Work-around for the inability to embed fonts in Mac PowerPoint?

Factual Questions
1

My vehement distaste for PowerPoint burns with the heat of a thousand suns, but, alas, it is the tool I am forced to use to create a very straightforward presentation that will run during a banquet. Each slide will have the honoree’s photo and some text. Everything is static – no animations or fancy transitions – and the slides will be advanced by a human being.

I will create said PPT on a Mac (running PowerPoint 2008) but it will run on a Windows machine. From what I have found by googling, it appears there is no way to embed fonts in the Mac version to circumvent font issues.

Am I asking for trouble if I create the slides in another program (like Quark or InDesign), save them as JPGs and insert them as a picture in PowerPoint? If this method is not a good strategy, is there some other way to go about it?

2

That’s what I would do.

3

Dude, if you have InDesign, create a PDF. You can set it to run in Full Screen mode. PM me if you want pointers or troubleshooting. I used to teach InDesign.

4

I’m not a dude (unless it’s “dude” in the sense of “you guys” ;)), but thanks for the offer! I may take you up on it.

5

Uh, yes. “Dude” as in an enthusiastic, non-gender-specific term of greeting ala Rob Schneider.

6

if it’s a Mac, you can save to PDF natively.

7

This is what I was coming into the thread to suggest. I would say it’s the easiest solution if PP is what you must use.

8

I was definitely going to say: don’t save them as JPEGs. PDF would be best, but if you can’t do that, then PNG or GIF would be a lot better than JPEG. Unless you make the JPEGs rather large, the text is going to look kinda fuzzy.

9

PDFs are a piece of cake. I shall go that route. Thanks, one and all, for the advice!

10

I solved this problem by making my labels in PowerPoint, selecting them, right-clicking, and Save as Picture-ing them as PNGs to temporary files. Then I bring the PNGs back into PowerPoint in the place of the original labels (once they’re in the PPT, just throw away the temporary files). That way, as noted, my presentations can travel on a thumb drive without caring what computer or version of PowerPoint they’re running on. Downside: I can’t correct a typo or make other minor changes without repeating the process.

BigT: few computer projectors can project an image more than 1200 pixels wide, so fuzziness with JPGs is not the same issue as with the Web or print. PowerPoint does not work well with PDFs; it just uses a low-res preview image rather than rasterizing the PDF.