Some web references about PowerPoint suggest that for a presentation to be guaranteed to work on any PC, it should only use Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, and Symbol fonts - and more specifically that bolding, italicization, underlining, and the like shouldn’t be used with Symbol.
Is this more specific restriction really important? For example does your PC fail to support italics with the Symbol font?
When I try bold Symbol on my PCs it works, but the point is to know about the entire population of all PCs everywhere.
Bolding, italicisiation and underlining are possible, but not generally used with the Symbol font because those operations would alter the nature of the symbol depicted
For example: the double-tilde (or is it a wavy equals sign?):
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Bolding it just makes it blotchy and makes parts of it join where they shouldn’t: »
Underlining it makes it look like it might mean something else entirely:
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Italicising it isn’t too bad: »
But there are other characters that suffer when they are italicised; particularly those consisting mainly (or entirely) of vertical strokes; italicise a vertical bar and it looks like a forward slash.
So you *can do it, and I’m sure it will be supported, but by convention, you shouldn’t
Yes, under “Tools”/“Save Options” you can choose to “embed” truetype fonts. You can also choose to save the entire font with your presentation (in case you have to make hasty edits) or just the characters you’ve actually used. The former, naturally, makes your filesize bigger.
I’d also recommend saving the presentation under several different names on your CD, and copying the CD onto at least two other CDs, and uploading the presentation to an online site. No point travelling to another city to give an important presentation and not having multiple backups.