Embed Fonts in a Document

You’ve sent a well-formatted document by email to your colleagues. But when they opened it on their computers, the fonts were all wrong: bland fonts were substituted for the ones you used. Worse, the font changes had messed up the layout.

You’ve probably figured out what’s wrong: your colleagues’ computers don’t have the fonts you used, so Word substituted other fonts. When the substitutes take up different amounts of space, the layout can change. The combined effects can be distressing.

To solve this problem, you can embed the fonts you use in the document so that they’ll be there when anyone opens the document on their computer. Here’s how:

1. Click File tab and choose Options to open the Word Options dialog box, and click the Save option from the left pane.
2. From the right pane, select your document from the “Preserve fidelity when sharing this document” list.
3. Check the “Embed fonts in the file” box to embed the complete character sets of all the fonts you’ve used in the document.
4. Embedding the complete character sets bulks up the file size and is necessary only if you want your colleagues to be able to edit your document. It’s usually best to also check the “Embed only the characters used in the document” box to keep the file size small.
5. Check the “Do not embed common system fonts” box; your colleagues should have these fonts on their PCs.
6. Click the OK button.
7. Save the document.