Understanding How Font Choices Can Impact What Recipients See

One of the most basic components of formatting documents in any program is also often one of the most problematic: fonts. You can choose beautiful, creative, and interesting fonts, but if they are not standard fonts and do not exist on the recipient’s computer, your document might look entirely different to the recipient. When a font does not exist on a computer, the program in which you open a document (such as Word or Excel) will substitute the closest font available. Often the closest font has differently sized characters from your original font, which can alter alignment of complex layouts, change pagination, or distort graphics.

 

Fortunately, there are ways to share your files that can help alleviate concerns about fonts, and those are addressed later in this section. But before we get there, it’s important to understand the limitations so that you can make font choices that provide the best results for your particular needs.

·         A font may exist in the font list that you see in a given program on your computer, but that doesn’t mean that it was installed as part of Microsoft Office or that it will be available to recipients. Most software programs in which you can create content display all available fonts that are installed on your computer—whether they were installed by the active application, the operating system, or another application, or manually installed as a custom font.

·         Available Office 2010 fonts also vary by edition. In particular, Office 2010 Professional (a retail edition) and Office 2010 Standard and Office 2010 Professional Plus (the volume license editions) include many more fonts than Office 2010 Home and Student and Home and Business editions. This is because the Standard, Professional, and Professional Plus editions include Microsoft Publisher 2010, which provides a large number of fonts. If you share documents with users of earlier versions of Office for Windows, it might be worth noting that Office 2010 Standard Edition is the first version of Microsoft Office Standard to include Publisher (and thus the fonts that ship with Publisher).

·         Office 2011 includes the same fonts in all of its versions (Home and Student, Home and Business, and the volume license edition). However, fonts do vary by platform. That is, Office 2010 and Office 2011 have many but not all of the same fonts.

So what do you need to know about fonts for sharing files with users of earlier Microsoft Office versions? Some of the fonts in Table shown below, were introduced in Office 2007 and Office 2008 (such as the default fonts Calibri and Cambria). Gabriola was introduced in Office 2010 and Office 2011. These recently introduced fonts are included in the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack, mentioned earlier in this chapter, that is available for users of Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 for Windows. For users of Office for Mac 2004, those fonts introduced in Office 2008 are installed with the File Format Converter for Mac. Additionally, for users of Office 2007, Gabriola is provided in Microsoft Office Updates. With the free compatibility pack and file format converter tools, users of earlier versions can open and work with documents that use the Office Open XML file formats.

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