Embeding Fonts in Word Documents

Embeding Fonts in Word Documents

By Allen Wyatt for Word.Tips.Net

The fonts you use in a document determine exactly how that document appears when viewed or printed. If you are sharing your documents with others, you will want to make sure that they have the same fonts you used in the document. If they don’t, then they may not be able to read the information you send.

Why is this? If you use a particular font in a document, then send that document to another person who does not have that font on their system, Word tries to figure out what font it can use as a substitute for the font you used. In some cases, the results are an unreadable mess with symbols being substituted for characters and vice-versa. Even if the substituted font results in a readable document, your precise formatting may no longer apply since Word uses the character widths and sizing of the substituted font, not the original. Thus, text will flow differently on the target system and lines or pages will not break at the same place as originally intended.

Word does provide a potential solution to this mess: you can embed fonts in a document. Word allows you to embed fonts in your document, with a couple of caveats. First of all, the fonts must be TrueType fonts, and second, they must be available for embedding. Figuring out if a font is TrueType is easy enough—you can take a look at the Windows Font folder to figure that out, or you can simply look for the telltale TT next to the font name in Word’s Font drop-down list.

Figuring out if a font is embeddable is another issue

This post is excerpted with permission from Word.Tips.Net

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