S
Steve Rindsberg
Sorry it took a couple of days to get to it. Generating the new
presentation in a folder on my hard drive resulted in a new folder
containing lots of stuff besides the presentation file itself -- I
hope you didn't need that emailed as well.
No problem on either count. What you sent was exactly what I was after.
I had a look at the slide in the Script Editor (which can often reveal more about fonts that PPT itself
will tell you). The text that includes both Devanagari/Sanskrit and Ethiopic is very definitely ALL set
in Arial Unicode MS. There are no requests for add'l fonts.
The specific characters requested are in a numeric range that contains no characters in Arial Unicode MS
(which fits with our earlier observation that neither Character Map nor Insert Symbol mentions Ethiopic).
But here's where it starts to get interesting: Apparently Windows has the ability to substitute fonts at
need when a requested character isn't present in the current font. In other words, it looks at your
presentation's request for Arial Unicode MS, character number 4707 decimal/1263 hex, finds that the
character isn't present in the font, goes rummaging around in its font collection, finds another font that
DOES have the requested glyphs, and uses it instead.
As unlikely as this may seem, I offer this as proof:
I went here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Amharic
and found a link to gfzemenu.ttf (GF Zemen Unicode), an Ethiopic font. I downloaded that, dropped it into
my fonts folder, went back to your PPT presentation (w/o even closing and reopening it or restarting PPT)
and bingo, it was now displaying the correct Ethiopic glyphs (ie, they matched the screen shot you
included, as near as I can tell).
Despite the fact that it's clearly using a different font to display the Ethiopic characters, PPT still
shows that the text is in Arial Unicode MS (and in fact it is ... PPT is still asking for character 4707
et al in that font, but Windows is doing some fancy footwork behind the scenes to supply the needed glyph,
even if it has to swap fonts to do it.
That pretty much nails down the "Why it happens" bit, I think.
Now for the "What to DO about it."
The gfzemenu.ttf font I downloaded is completely embeddable. If the font you're using is also, you can
try embedding it in the PPT while saving.
First, you'd have to set the font back from Arial Unicode MS to [whatever you're using].
Then choose File, Save As, give the file a new name, then click Tools, choose Save Options, then put a
check next to Embed Truetype Fonts and save the file. This may or may not work ... here it crashed PPT
repeatedly(oddball fonts can do this).
If the font you're using will embed, then when you open the presentation on other computers, it should
work correctly.
For limited amounts of text, I'd suggest another simpler, much more reliable dodge:
Click within the text to get the editing cursor
Press ESC to select the shape that contains the text
Press Ctrl + C to copy the shape
Choose Edit, Paste Special and select PNG as the type; click OK
That'll give you an image of the text rather than the text itself. An image won't be editable, but will
require no fonts, so won't change.
You may then want to drag the original "fonted" text off the slide rather than just deleting it.
You can then drag it back on, edit, and reconvert to PNG should edits become necessary.
Whew. We owe one another a drink. ;-)