Yet another PPT 2003 embedded font question

[Guest]

I understand that you can open an existing Powerpoint file with an older
version and either turn off embedding of fonts, or even replace them. I have
spent a bit of time on Google checking out all of the existing posts about
embedded fonts (rdpslides and powerpointanswers included)

My question: is there an easy way to find out which specific non-shared font
PPT2K3 is looking for on the local machine so I can simply find the original
font and install it on the machines in question?

We have a number of custom company specific fonts in use here and even if I
open the file and check the 'Replace Fonts' option (standard TT icon) or
check properties-contents the font 'friendly names' are listed, but nothing
more. It appears that the font is loaded and available on the machine, my
only guess is that there was an update or change to the font somewhere down
the line. It would be helpful to find which font file name or datestamp or
whatever it may be using to determine that the version of 'XYZ' font in the
PPT file is not the same revision as the XYZ font loaded on the machine.
Since I may be looking at hundreds of files, resaving each one is definitely
not a practical option.

Any ideas or suggestions anyone?

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

We have a number of custom company specific fonts in use here and even if I

open the file and check the 'Replace Fonts' option (standard TT icon) or
check properties-contents the font 'friendly names' are listed, but nothing
more.

Look at the icons in the upper list box on the Replace Fonts dialog box closely.
Fonts that are present on the computer show a standard TT icon; embedded fonts
show an icon with much smaller Ts.

If you don't see anything but the standard TT or printer icons, then it might be
a different problem. A bug in PPT 2003: If you open a presentation that has
Arial Black embedded, PPT will turn on you if you don't have Arial Black Italic
loaded on the computer (or perhaps embedded in the presentation? haven't tried
that). It does this whether or not the presentation *requires* Arial Black
Italic.

If neither of the above is the case, please let us know. There may be other
fonts like Arial Black that kick sand; it'd be good to find out if so.

So far as anyone's been able to tell, there don't seem to be any issues around
font version/date stamps. PowerPoint seems not to pay attention to those. As
you know, the names must match exactly and of course Arial and Arial Unicode are
very definitely NOT equal.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the quick response Steve,

I am getting just the standard TT icon and was wondering if it was related
to the 'undocumented feature' that you mentioned as well. Currently the list
of required fonts includes Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, Wingdings
and our corporate font. After reading about the bug the first time around I
went back and checked to make sure that Arial Black was not on the list.
It's good to know that it only looks at the display name of the font for
comparison, although that must have been one HECK of an algorithm to write,
esp if it's broken.

As a side note, I checked through a few of the sample documents and
ironically I couldn't find our font even being used on a couple of the files.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Thanks for the quick response Steve,

I am getting just the standard TT icon and was wondering if it was related
to the 'undocumented feature'

Let's amend that to "previously undocumented feature, now documented and listed
as a bug". MS knows about it, thanks mostly to a lot of dogged effort and help
from one of our newsgroup visitors.

Since this isn't the bug that's gnawing on you, maybe we can take your problem a
step farther. Can you cause the problem to reproduce itself in a relatively
small and non-proprietary PPT file? If so, I'd like to have a look.

Email to steve a-inna-circle pptools dot com will get it here.

that you mentioned as well. Currently the list