Text breaking up at smaller fonts/how does PPT create slideshow mode?

[camnoreal]

Really hoping someone can shed some light on this for me...

My company's computers have always displayed our standard Franklin
Gothic Book font fine at all sizes. But within the last month,
anything under 10pt is now breaking up on screen in slideshow mode.
I've tested multiple computers and multiple screens. The only solution
for displaying it correctly is to use a personal laptop.

Granted, we do not have top of the line machines, but my own laptop is
nothing special (the only advantage might be a separate video card.)

All computers are running Office 2007 & Windows 7, with the same font
cut.

The only thing I can think is that there is some network build issue
(an update?) that is affecting PPT's rendering of this font at smaller
sizes. Note: even Arial is not as crisp as it once was.

I know that PPT uses a printer driver for slideshow mode, and I have
tried different drivers. I do not think this is the documented issue
in which text becomes jumbled and spaced out.

So, my big question is: What exactly is happening under the hood when
PPT goes into slideshow mode? The small font is crisp at all sizes and
zooms in layout mode, and appears fine in Word and Excel. There is
something about slideshow mode that causes the problematic rendering.

Any thoughts?


- Nolan

 

[camnoreal]

Well, I kind of figured it out. I was testing a single slide that had
A LOT of vector information in addition to the text. It was a slide
that had been edited to death on multiple computers by multiple
people. I grouped, ungrouped and turned off visibility on the
graphics, but still no dice. When I finally copy and pasted the entire
slide content onto a fresh slide, the text displayed properly.

I still don't really understand why, but perhaps all the editing left
a jumble of code and invisible stuff that caused PPT to just choke by
the time it gout around to rendering the text after the graphics?

I don't really know, and under the hood PPT continues to be a mystery,
but if you're having this issue, just try copying all your content or
at least parts of your content to a fresh slide and/or document to
test for the problem.

Never seen anything like this in 10 years, but there's a first for
everything, I guess.

- Nolan