If you have spent hours meticulously designing a flyer or a professional resume in Microsoft Word using a beautiful, custom downloaded font, you might be horrified to discover that when you email the document to your colleague, the formatting is completely broken. This happens because the custom font is installed on your hard drive, but not on theirs. To ensure your document looks exactly the same on any computer, you must embed the font directly into the Word file itself.
How Font Embedding Works
When you embed a font, Microsoft Word essentially packages a copy of the font’s underlying data file (like a .ttf or .otf file) directly inside the .docx container. This increases the overall file size of your document, but it guarantees that the recipient’s computer can perfectly render the text, even if they have never downloaded or installed that specific font.
Step-by-Step Instructions
- Open your completed Microsoft Word document containing the custom font.
- Click on File in the top-left corner of the screen.
- Scroll all the way down the left-hand blue menu and click on Options.
- In the “Word Options” window that appears, click on Save in the left sidebar.
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the right-hand panel until you see the section labeled “Preserve fidelity when sharing this document.”
- Check the box labeled Embed fonts in the file.
- To keep the file size from becoming unnecessarily massive, also check the sub-box labeled Embed only the characters used in the document (best for reducing file size). This tells Word to only package the specific letters you actually typed, rather than the entire alphabet and all special characters.
- Click OK.
Finally, click Save (Ctrl + S) on your document. Your custom font is now permanently tethered to the file, and you can safely email it or transfer it via a USB drive to any other Windows PC without fear of formatting errors.