How Can Missing Fonts Impact Viewing of Office Documents?

Hundreds of billions of Microsoft Office documents are created each year and it’s a safe bet to assume that most of those documents are created on a Windows PC using Microsoft Office. But once shared, those Office documents could end up being viewed using any number of software solutions on virtually any interactive devices – Windows PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, iPads, iPhones, Android devices, Linux workstations and more. Each device has a unique set of available fonts that can impact how a document looks when opening it or viewing it within different applications and solutions.

There is a unique challenge to ensuring that a Microsoft Office document looks correct, regardless of what fonts were used when the document was created. But first, some background.

What Is a Font and Why Should It Matter??

The word ‘font’ is used to describe the size, weight, and style of text. The word ‘font’ can also be used to describe the electronic file that stores size, weight, and style information. In the simplest terms, fonts define how text should look. The following example shows three different fonts:?

Note the differences in each line – character thickness, height, width, design. Some differences are subtle, some obvious.

But why are there fonts? Why doesn’t text always look the same? There have been many studies and articles on how text appearance can impact human perception and internalization of written content. Without getting into specifics, experts agree that fonts are an important part of how readers respond to and retain written information.

There are more fonts out there than you probably realize – over a half million fonts exist today – but there is no standard set of fonts to be included in a computing device.?Your PC at work, your PC at home, your phone and your tablet likely all include different sets of fonts.

With new fonts being made available to users all the time, it is impossible for every device to have every available font. This results in people opening documents that were created with fonts that are not present on their device, and those documents can be formatted incorrectly as a result.

Microsoft Office Documents and Fonts

Microsoft Office documents are highly dependent on fonts to determine not only how the text appears, but how the entire layout of the document appears. When a user changes text to use a different font, the entire look of the text can change. But, more importantly, the size and spacing of the text will change – and with that other elements within the document could move.

Now for the critical detail – the fonts used to create Microsoft Office documents are rarely stored in the document itself. The document only references the name of the font; the actual font data is on the creator’s PC. So, what happens if a user creates a document that uses fonts available on their system, and then someone else views the document on a different system that does not have those fonts?

The Problem with Font Substitution

If a font is not available, then it will be replaced with some other font that IS available on the viewer’s system. This could be a close match or something that is completely different, depending on the system being used to view, the application being used to view, and what fonts are available. For instance, depending on who is opening the document, with what application, on what device and with what fonts installed, these:

could become one of these:

Whatever intention the document creator had with the chosen font is lost on the readers who are opening this document without that font available.

But a bigger problem lurks. The replacement fonts all have different spacing compared to the original one. This will impact the text and overall layout of the document as it is adjusted to fit using the replacement font. Here is an example of what could happen when this occurs:

In this example, the substitute font has wider spacing than the original, causing line breaks to change and requiring additional lines in each paragraph to display the text. The chart that should appear in the middle of the page is pushed down to make room for the text, but the picture in the bottom right corner cannot move, as its position is fixed to that spot on the page. So, the chart collides with the picture and its content is obscured. The remaining text on the page is further pushed down and falls off the page, disappearing entirely. The one-page document now has a second page, but there is no real content on it.

Someone making a decision based on the content of the chart, or the last few lines of text in the Conclusion, is left without all the necessary information, simply because the fonts on their phone are different than those used to create the document.?

?How to Try to Avoid This Problem

When creating a document, one could only use the most basic fonts available. Using the default fonts available in Microsoft Office will probably ensure others have no problem viewing your files. But that is pretty limiting.

Or when creating a document, one could embed fonts from the system into the document when saving. Unfortunately, this functionality is hidden behind several clicks in Microsoft Office’s user interface and most users don’t know about it. It also causes the file size to become much larger as it expands to include font data.

To view a document someone else has provided, Microsoft Office has introduced cloud fonts. When a font is found in an Office document and it is not available on the system, Microsoft will check the cloud to see if it can be downloaded. This is a nice feature, but only works for fonts available in Microsoft’s cloud and takes extra time. It also only works with Microsoft Office. It is not available in other Office suites or viewers.?

A More Elegant Solution

Qualcomm has designed a better solution and has included it in the Qualcomm? DirectOffice??file conversion and viewing software. This patented font solution does not depend on system fonts or cloud fonts or anything outside of the DirectOffice software itself and is designed to mimic the style and design of the original font used in the document as well as the width and height of the characters in the original font. And the Qualcomm font solution supports thousands of fonts in a fraction of the storage it would take to store all the original font data.

With this patented font technology, Qualcomm? DirectOffice? can make documents look more like what the original document creator intended. For instance, these:

look like this with DirectOffice:

And layout is retained regardless of operating system or device being used:

The DirectOffice Advantage

No other Office file viewer or converter includes this technology. DirectOffice alone can emulate both the look-and-feel and the size metrics of thousands of original fonts when making a substitution. The following example includes a line of text as it appears in several different solutions.

You can see in the above that only in the Microsoft Office original and DirectOffice does the text appear correctly and is not cut off by the picture on the right. DirectOffice also does a better job than other solutions emulating what the original font looks like.

Thanks in part to its patented font technology, Qualcomm DirectOffice?Document Conversion Software is uniquely positioned to ensure Office documents can be accurately viewed virtually anywhere they may be found. In addition to intelligent font substitution, the table below includes other feature advantages of DirectOffice:?

How Can I Find Out More?

If you are interested in seeing more about DirectOffice software, and how it could be part of your software solution, please check out the product page over on the Qualcomm?website. If you want to talk directly, you can?contact me here. I look forward to hearing from you.

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