How to Embed Fonts in Microsoft Word?

Creating plain and lengthy Word document is a boring task not only for creator but also for the readers. One easy way is to use different font styles and show important text in a pull quote. However, using multiple fonts and sending across the document in email can create problems in compatibility. The recipients may open the document in different operating system that does not have the fonts you used on your documents. In such a case, Word offers an easy solution to embed fonts in documents.

Embed Fonts in Microsoft Word Windows

Microsoft Word is one of the widely used text processing applications. However, it has many fonts to use on the documents. You can simply choose the required font from “Font” group dropdown under “Home” tab. The indicator O represents OpenType and TT represents TrueType. You can only embed these two font types in Microsoft Word.

If you are using custom font in Word, make sure it is either from a TTF (TrueType) font file or from OTF (OpenType).

Follow the below instructions to embed OTF or TTF fonts in Word Windows version.

• Go to “File” menu and navigate to “Options” section.

• This will open “Word Options” dialog box and navigate to “Save” section.
• Check under “Preserve fidelity when saving this document” section on the right pane and enable the check box against “Embed fonts in this file” option.

• Click “OK” to close the dialog box.
• Now, you can save your document including the embedded fonts.
• Anyone can open the document in any operating systems. As the font is embedded, reader will get the same view as the original document.

Additional Options

As mentioned, make sure to use one of the available OTF or TTF fonts and not any other custom fonts. Other problem in embedding font is that it will increase the size of your file. In order to avoid large file size, Word offers two additional options.

• Select “Embed only the characters used in the document (best for reducing file size)” option. This will only embed the characters and not all the fonts from the font file thus help to minimize the size.
• Select “Do not embed common system fonts” option. This will disable embedding commonly used fonts on all operating systems.

You have also an option to enable font embedding only for the current document or all new documents. Select the file from the dropdown on the “Preserver fidelity…….” line to apply this change.  

Embedding Fonts in Word Mac Version

If you are using Microsoft Office 365 version in Mac, follow the below instructions to embed fonts in documents.

• When you in Word, go to “Word > Preferences…” menu.
• Click on “Save” button to open saving preferences.

• Similar to Windows 10, select the document and check the option “Embed fonts in the file”.

• Make sure to check “Embed only the characters used in the document (best for reducing file size)” option to have a smaller file size.