I’ve avoided MS office like the plague for the better part of a decade now, but I’ve recently hit a snafu at work. I’ve been asked to modify and give a (long) talk that was made using Powerpoint on OSX, while I only have (non-admin) access to a Linux machine with LibreOffice there. I also have to give the talk on a third party’s Windows machine with very little setup time (basically someone else loads the file in Powerpoint or opens the PDF shortly beforehand, and then I’m supposed to just get up and go). All this is still tractable (what I’d normally do is open the presentation in Impress, make my changes and fix compatibility issues, and just export a PDF for the actual talk).
The real problem is that I’m going to be passing this presentation back and forth with the original authors (and probably others) for future updates, and that fonts of different sizes/profiles mess up slide layout.
So the question I think I want to ask is: Is there any simple way to pass fonts between Powerpoint and LibreOffice along with a .ppt, or else to guarantee the use of a font that has a reasonably similar profile?
Otherwise, I’ll have to find access to a machine with Powerpoint; trying to get 5 other people to change their workflow for my sake is not necessarily a practical option. (Though using Powerpoint might end up as a necessity anyway, if they insist on using some other feature that’s a pain to convert over; I’m trying to avoid it because AFAIK no machine on my floor has Windows or OSX, bringing in a new machine seems like overkill for such a narrow application, and leaving the office every time I need to do this is a huge PITA.)
[Edit: After having taken some time to recover from the headache that all this has caused me and calm down, I’ve realized that my best bets might be either just relying on fonts installed locally on my Linux box, or using Google Docs rather than LibreOffice as my MS Office substitute. Nonetheless, I’m still curious about whether there’s any sort of standard way to port presentations between different machines with different font sets.]
[Edit2: Sticking with MS Core Fonts, which happen to be on all the machines, is working, though I’m getting a bit sick of Arial. Google Docs was a flop; I tried it because I hadn’t looked in a while, but there were at least a half dozen reasons it was terrible idea. I’d still like to know if there’s any easy way to deal with fonts not present on different OS’s, other than exporting a PDF.]