PowerPoint 2008 WTF: No Support for 3rd Party Fonts!?!

Wow. This is an unbelievable response from Microsoft support :

The 2008 version of Powerpoint does not correctly support several of our 3rd-party fonts, including Agfa’s “Sacker” font, all of which worked just fine in Powerpoint 2004 for the Mac. When selected in the font menu Powerpoint 2008 displays them with a substitute/generic font that looks nothing like the selected font. This occurs without any warning or dialog box that a substitution has occurred.

Upon calling Redmond for help, Microsoft’s Mac Tech Support laughably told me after emailing them a bunch of sample files and enduring several long periods on hold that “the engineers writing the program decided no 3rd-party fonts were being supported in Office 2008 and that I could only use Microsoft fonts.” I find this hard to believe and wonder if this was just something he said to placate me. I hope that the issue is resolved in a forthcoming bug fix release so that we will not have to continue to keep Powerpoint 2004 around indefinitely.

We have the same problem here at Adobe: the Myriad Pro font used in our standard corporate template looks terrible in PowerPoint 2008 but looked fine in PowerPoint 2004.

screenshot of ppt 2004 vs 2008

That is NOT Myriad Pro! Good thing I use Keynote…

~ by Andrew Shebanow on 26Feb08.

Posted in Technology
Tags: , , , , ,

11 Responses to “PowerPoint 2008 WTF: No Support for 3rd Party Fonts!?!”

  1. This explains so much. None of it good, though.

    Sigh, and I still have yet to test FontCard with Office 2008.

    Rosyna said this on 26Feb08 at 17:13

  2. Dear God. I do hope they fix this. What’s next ‘everything in Comic Sans???

    marco said this on 27Feb08 at 05:16

  3. It feels like Microsoft has a death wish don’t it?

    jeremy said this on 27Feb08 at 08:14

  4. As a point of clarification: I don’t actually think the MS support person knew what they were talking about: it HAS to be a bug. But its still an unbelievably arrogant and unsympathetic thing to tell a customer.

    Andrew Shebanow said this on 27Feb08 at 10:52

  5. Hi Andrew. Have you seen any update on this from Microsoft?

    Jeff Whatcott said this on 29Apr08 at 07:42

  6. Haven’t heard a word on this from Microsoft, but then I haven’t been paying a huge amount of attention.

    Andrew Shebanow said this on 30Apr08 at 11:43

  7. The latest service pack fixed this issue. Huzzah.

    Jeff Whatcott said this on 20May08 at 19:27

  8. I’ve run into this too but can use some 3rd party fonts but not all, for example Avenir 65 Heavy works but Avenir 55 Book doesn’t.

    Andrew Carr said this on 11Aug08 at 15:14

  9. Hello,

    Per Jeff’s comment I installed the service pack 1 for powerpoint (I have 2007) and it did not fix the font stacking issue with Myriad Pro. Any other suggestions?

    Thanks,

    Heidi

    Heidi said this on 26Aug08 at 17:33

  10. Heidi, I think the service pack 1 reference only applies to Mac PowerPoint 2008.

    Andrew Shebanow said this on 26Aug08 at 18:34

  11. Hi Andrew, thanks for the response. I’ll keep searching or maybe downgrade to an earlier version where everything seemed to work fine.

    Heidi said this on 27Aug08 at 18:25

Comments are closed.

 
%d bloggers like this: