Embedding Fonts in a Document

The fonts you use in a document determine exactly how that document appears when viewed or printed. If you are sharing your documents with others, you will want to make sure that they have the same fonts you used in the document. If they don't, then they may not be able to read the information you send.

Why is this? If you use a particular font in a document, then send that document to another person who does not have that font on their system, Word tries to figure out what font it can use as a substitute for the font you used. In some cases, the results are an unreadable mess with symbols being substituted for characters and vice-versa. Even if the substituted font results in a readable document, your precise formatting may no longer apply since Word uses the character widths and sizing of the substituted font, not the original. Thus, text will flow differently on the target system and lines or pages will not break at the same place as originally intended.

Word does provide a potential solution to this mess: you can embed fonts in a document. Word allows you to embed fonts in your document, with a couple of caveats. First of all, the fonts must be TrueType fonts, and second, they must be available for embedding. Figuring out if a font is TrueType is easy enough—you can take a look at the Windows Font folder to figure that out, or you can simply look for the telltale TT next to the font name in Word's Font drop-down list.

Figuring out if a font is embeddable is another issue. When a font is created by the designer, it can be set to one of four levels of embedding compatibility:

• Fully Embeddable. These will embed in the document and install themselves on the target system if they do not already exist there.
• Editable Embedding. The document is editable in the embedded font but will not permanently install on the target system.
• Print and Preview Only. The document will print with the correct font on the target system, but it is not editable, and the font will not install.
• Not Embeddable. The font stays on the original system and cannot be embedded in a document.

Word respects the wishes of the font designer, according to the possible settings show here. If a designer marks a font as "not embeddable," then you cannot embed it in a document. More precisely, you can instruct Word to embed TrueType fonts, but Word ignores your instruction when it comes to the font that is marked as not embeddable.

So how do you find out if a font is embeddable? If you are using Windows 7 or a later version you can right-click on the font file, choose Properties, and then display the Details tab of the dialog box. You should be able to find on that tab an Embeddability field that shows how (and if) the font can be embedded. Note that not all fonts list Properties in the context menu when you right-click on the font.

If a font is not embeddable, then you are faced with a decision: whether to use the font or not. If you do use it, then the document will only display properly on systems where the font is really installed. If you don't use it, then you will need to find a different font that meets your design and sharing needs.

Once you know that a font can be embedded in a document, you need to instruct Word to do the actual embedding. You do this by following these steps:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 and later versions display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. At the left of the dialog box click Save. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Save options in the Word Options dialog box.

3. Make sure the Embed Fonts In the File check box is selected.
4. If you will be using a small number of characters in a particular font, choose the Embed Only the Characters Used in the Document check box
5. Click on OK.
6. Work with your documents as normal.

You should know that when you embed a font, the size of your document can be significantly increased. If you don't choose the check box in step 4, then Word embeds the entire font. In either case (full font or just characters), the size of your document is increased by the size of the font being embedded, plus some overhead required by Word.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6073) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Embedding Fonts in a Document.