Why Are Fonts Always A Hassle?
So, you want to share a PowerPoint with someone, but you know that they won’t have the right fonts installed? That’s ok! You can embed the Font into the PowerPoint file, so that the file will display correctly for them regardless.
Oh, wait, that doesn’t work. Most of the time. Sigh.
Unfortunately, you’re likely to run into an error message when you open the file on the other computer:
“This presentation cannot be edited because it contains one or more read-only embedded (restricted) fonts. To editing the presentation you must remove the restricted fonts, or you can open the presentation as read-only.”
Or, if you are trying to open your file inPowerPoint online, you might see this error:
“READ ONLY This presentation contains read-only embedded fonts. To edit it, use the app.”
So, now what? This message is shown, because either the Font you are using is marked as a Copyrighted font, and/or the font has been marked as only permissible for limited use – forbidding embedding.
How to check if a font is marked as restricted for embedding?
On Windows:
- Go to Windows Explorer, and navigate to C:\Windows\Fonts
- Find the font file you are interested.
- Right click on the font file, and choose “Properties”.
- Go to the details tab.
- Check the status in the “Font embeddability” row.
- For a font to be suitable for embedding, the status needs to be “Editable” or “Installable“.
On Mac:
- Open Font Book
- Select the font you are interested in
- Go to the view menu, and choose “show info pane”
- On the right side pane, under the Usage section, check the Embedding status. It should say “No embedding restrictions” ideally, but “Editable embedding” should also be OK to embed.
Editing / Modifying Restricted Fonts to Make Them Embeddable
OK, so you have found that the font you want to use is restricted for embedding… so how do we get around this?
Method 1: TTFPATCH (For PC, and for .TTF font files only)
There is a software tool called TTFPatch, which allows you to set/modify/remove the font’s marker that says what the font is allowed to be used for. This marker is set by the font author, who we really should be respecting… but we also really need to get work done too. What you do with this knowledge is entirely up to you, but you should are supposed to have permission of the font author to modify their font files, and doing so without permission could be violating the font’s licensing agreement. TTFPatch is relatively easy (manual is here) to use if you have used a command line utility before, but naturally only works on PC. I recommend to set the fsType to be zero.
Method 2: FontForge (for Mac/PC and TTF/OTF files)
For OTF files, or if you are not on a PC, we need to take a different route. FontForge is a powerful open-source font editing tool, for Mac, PC and Linux. You can open almost any font files in FontForge. We need to do 3 things to “bless” the font files sufficiently for PowerPoint to be happy.
- We need to change the font “embeddability” marker to allow font installation.
- We may need to clear out the Vendor ID
- We may need to remove the font’s copyright information
Again, I’m assuming you have permission from the font author to edit the files in this way…
- First, you need to open your font file.
- Go to the “Element” menu, and choose “Font Info”.
- In the window that appears, on the left side choose “OS/2”
- Next, change the “Embeddable” dropdown to say “Installable”.
- In most cases, this is all you need to do, and can skip to step 9. If you have problems, keep going.
- Then, lower down in the window, delete all text in the Vendor ID text field.
- Finally, on the left side of the window, choose “PS Names”.
- Now, clear all text in the copyright section.
- Click OK.
- Now, we need to save the font with the changes applied. Go to the “File” menu, and choose “Generate Fonts”.
- Save your font file in your desired format.
- Remove the old font file from your computer, and install the file we just created instead.
- Restart PowerPoint, and load your file.
- Toggle font embedding off, and then on again to force PowerPoint to refresh the embedded font file.
- Save your PowerPoint file.
- You should be done, and should have a PowerPoint file embedded with beautiful font-y goodness.
If you still have issues, you may need to go to PowerPoint, and see which fonts are actually in use in your document. There may be more than you realise — things like Wingdings (fancy bullets are Wingdings!), or using Emoji’s (comes from your computer’s system font) can cause problems for you here. Don’t forget that the slide master templates, and the notes section on each slide can both also have different fonts set too.
P.S And there is still more – Mac PowerPoint Font Embedding Bug
To add insult to injury, on Mac, there is a font embedding bug. If you have multiple documents open, and toggle font embedding (in preferences under “Save”), the file that the toggle is applied to may not be the file that is listed as selected! Often, the embed toggle is actually applied to the next file in the selection list. This can result in very strange behaviour where Mac PowerPoint says that font embedding is turned on, but in reality the file does not have the fonts embedded. You’ll notice the file will briefly show “Saving…” in the window title bar, if the file has actually updated as requested.
I really hopes this article helps someone else having frustrating problems with embedding fonts in PowerPoint.
Please do leave a comment if this worked for you!