Sara Shutt wants to email Word documents with an unusual font. But her documents arrive without the font she chose.
Back in the days when we printed our documents and snail-mailed them, this wasn’t a problem. But today, if you care about your chosen font, you have to make sure it travels with the document.
That’s actually pretty easy with Microsoft Word. But there are, of course, qualifications.
I tested this in Word 2010 and 2013.
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To make the fonts travel with the file, click the File tab and select Options.
1. In the Word Options dialog box, select Save in the left panel.
2. Then check Embed fonts in the file.
That’s it. The font will be visible on the recipient’s computer…maybe. Also, the file might be huge.
Let’s talk about file size. I tested this with a very small, 25KB DOCX file. But when I checked the Embed fonts in the file option and saved the file again, it had ballooned to over 4MB.
No matter what you do, the files will be bigger. But they don’t have to be that much bigger. If you go back to Options > Save, you’ll find two options below “Embed fonts in the file.” I found that checking Do not embed common system fonts reduced the file size to about 1.4MB. Checking the other option–or both options–reduced it to a reasonable 56KB.
Big or small, your choice fonts won’t show up in all programs. In my tests, the font Notepaper Airplanes showed up in Word and LibreOffice. It did not show up in WordPad (unless the font was pre-installed onto the PC) or Google Docs.
So it’s possible that even with this change, your recipient will not see the fonts you chose.