Will PC Custom Font display in Mac?

[Ted Kerin]

Sorry, I used to own a Mac but no longer have one for testing, so any advice
will be appreciated.

I helped my wife to create a Powerpoint on her PC (mostly done w/ PPT 2007,
altho' some edits were done on a different machine w/ PPT 2003), and, for
reasons related to the subject matter, I used a special, downloaded font. It
was an embeddable font, and I successfully saved it as part of the PPT, so
that it plays fine on PCs that do not have this Font installed in the OS.

Now, the wife asks a good question: If she has to copy this PPT onto a MAC
laptop (say, when presenting her talk at some Mac-only school which may
insist that you use their own Mac for presentations),....will this font
display? And for that matter, will the whole Powerpoint in general display
on Mac?

There is a Mac version of this particular font, but since I was creating and
editing the presentation on a PC, I of course used the PC version.

So, my questions would include:

Will this PC PPT file display at all on a Mac?
If so, will it likely display using the special font that I installed and
then embedded (using the Save Options/Tools) on PC? Or will it instead
default to a more generic font?
and,
Is there an emulator online (or downloadable as software) that will let me
test, on my PC, what this PC-built PPT will look like on a Mac?

Many thanks!




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[Steve Rindsberg]

Sorry, I used to own a Mac but no longer have one for testing, so any advice
will be appreciated.

I helped my wife to create a Powerpoint on her PC (mostly done w/ PPT 2007,
altho' some edits were done on a different machine w/ PPT 2003), and, for
reasons related to the subject matter, I used a special, downloaded font. It
was an embeddable font, and I successfully saved it as part of the PPT, so
that it plays fine on PCs that do not have this Font installed in the OS.

Now, the wife asks a good question: If she has to copy this PPT onto a MAC
laptop (say, when presenting her talk at some Mac-only school which may
insist that you use their own Mac for presentations),....will this font
display?

Not unless it happens to be installed on the Mac. Font embedding doesn't work in Mac
PPT, unfortuantely.

And for that matter, will the whole Powerpoint in general display
on Mac?

In general, yes. There can be incompatibilities. I'd want to know what version of
PPT the school has on its Macs. If it's pre-2008, you'll want to save from 2007 as a
PowerPoint 97-2003 file in order to be certain you can open it on the Mac.

There is a Mac version of this particular font, but since I was creating and
editing the presentation on a PC, I of course used the PC version.

So, my questions would include:

Will this PC PPT file display at all on a Mac?
If so, will it likely display using the special font that I installed and
then embedded (using the Save Options/Tools) on PC? Or will it instead
default to a more generic font?

See above.

Is there an emulator online (or downloadable as software) that will let me
test, on my PC, what this PC-built PPT will look like on a Mac?

Afraid not. While you can run Windows and Windows versions of Office on a Mac, the
reverse isn't true. (Strictly speaking, you *can* do some serious hacking and get
MacOS and Mac software to run on a PC, but that's probably a bit more of an adventure
than you're looking for).

 

[CyberTaz]

Hey Steve;

If it's just for display purposes what about saving it out of PC PPT as a
web Presentation & running it on a Mac through a browser if need arises?

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hey Steve;

If it's just for display purposes what about saving it out of PC PPT as a
web Presentation & running it on a Mac through a browser if need arises?

Interesting idea.

PPT's HTML can be cranky about running on non-MSIE browsers, but it's certainly
worth testing on MSIE 5/Mac. Playing with some of the backward-compatibility
options would help with that.

If animations aren't an issue, you can also save all of the slides as images, then
create a new presentation from just the images. No fonts needed then.

 

[Jeff_Chapman]

Hey Steve,

Listen to: Jeff

Haha... thanks for the vote of confidence!
Your solution of saving the slides as images and then re-importing the images onto the slides would be good in some circumstances, maybe even better than PDF. For instance, I've been working with a 2.4 MB presentation in PPT 2008, and I wanted to mail it to someone else, so I outputted it as PDF... but the resulting PDF was a whopping 7 MB. What a honker. If my presentation hadn't contained too many photos and was primarily line art, your solution would probably have worked well.

Of course, there's the issue of what format you want to finally output it to... I work with a developer who spends most of his day on the Linux platform. Needless to say, he isn't too happy when I send him documents created in PowerPoint - he has to boot up his Windows emulator. So PDF is the way to go with him.

On a different note, I'm actually surprised that PowerPoint 2008 for Mac and 2007 for Windows are as compatible as they are. There were so many new effects, such as line gradation, a totally new set of text styles and shadows, and so on that were introduced in PPT 2007/2008... and passing a presentation back and forth from 2007 to 2008 seems to leave the presentation almost no less worse for the wear. (Except for the fonts. Unless you want to stick with the basic Office set, of course...)

I do have my share of complaints about PowerPoint 2008, but the compatibility is surprisingly good, all things considered.

Whups, I digress.

Jeff

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Haha... thanks for the vote of confidence!

Your solution of saving the slides as images and then re-importing the images onto

the slides would be good in some circumstances, maybe even better than PDF. For
instance, I've been working with a 2.4 MB presentation in PPT 2008, and I wanted to
mail it to someone else, so I outputted it as PDF... but the resulting PDF was a
whopping 7 MB. What a honker. If my presentation hadn't contained too many photos and
was primarily line art, your solution would probably have worked well.

And depending on how you make PDFs, you may have settings available to you that'd
considerably reduce the final file size.

Converting to images does do a good job of protecting the text against later editing
while retaining the content as a PPT file. For some folks, both of those features are

Of course, there's the issue of what format you want to finally output it to... I

work with a developer who spends most of his day on the Linux platform. Needless to
say, he isn't too happy when I send him documents created in PowerPoint - he has to
boot up his Windows emulator. So PDF is the way to go with him.

Hear ya. Even under Windows/Mac, you can't be certain that everybody has a way of
reading PPT files, but it's pretty hard to find somebody who doesn't have Reader on
their computer.

On a different note, I'm actually surprised that PowerPoint 2008 for Mac and 2007 for

Windows are as compatible as they are. There were so many new effects, such as line
gradation, a totally new set of text styles and shadows, and so on that were introduced
in PPT 2007/2008... and passing a presentation back and forth from 2007 to 2008 seems
to leave the presentation almost no less worse for the wear. (Except for the fonts.
Unless you want to stick with the basic Office set, of course...)

Win some, lose some. Going to/from earlier versions has some serious problems. But I
suppose to move forward, you have to move away from the past. So it goes.