Subscribe
OS X Tip #107
You spend a lot of time working on an elaborate document, get the formatting just the way you want it. You send it off to another person. They open it to see your great work. Wow, the other person sees a mess! What happened?
Well it just may have been that the other person (especially Windows user) may not have the same fonts loaded on their machines that you used in your elaborate project. When this happens the other users computer will try to substitute a font they do have. This is rarely a problem on plain text based documents. But sometimes this will greatly upset an elaborate document’s formatting and layout. How do you fix this?
Here’s how:
Use common fonts that other users are very likely to already have. Arial, Century Gothic, Comic Sans MS, Courier, Courier New, Georgia, Tahoma, Times, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, and Wingdings are good choices.
I Need My Fancy Fonts
But you insist that you need to use that fancy font to accomplish your art. OK, send the other person a PDF of your document instead. PDF is built-in to OS X natively. Just pick Print -> PDF -> Save as PDF from most OS X applications. This will make it harder for the other person to edit your file. But, you may not want them to mess with your masterpiece anyway.
Note: What if it is a Quark or an Adobe Indesign project you are handing off to another designer? No problem these applications allow you to gather up the fonts you used in your creation. Quark calls this Collect for Output and Indesign calls this the Package command.
