PowerPoint Font Manager user guide

PowerPoint Font Manager tells you which fonts a .pptx actually uses and which of those are installed here, then builds a sidecar .zip that installs the rest on the machine that needs them.

The hosted tool with the repo’s synthetic test deck loaded: five fonts found, four installed on the machine that took the picture, one family present but not at the weight the deck asks for, and the bundle ready to build. The deck never left the browser.

Everything happens in the browser. The deck is never uploaded anywhere.

Before you rely on this: I’ve checked the scanner against three real presentations from different places (one from Canva, one from Office with embedded fonts, and a 316 MB deck that names almost no fonts explicitly), and its installed/missing verdicts were checked font by font against the operating system’s own font list on macOS.

The bundle’s Windows installer has been run end to end on Windows 11, which is how I caught it unregistering every other per-user font on the machine (fixed since). The macOS and Linux ones are syntax-checked but haven’t been run against a real font install. Check the bundle on a spare machine before you rely on it in front of a client.

This codebase was created with AI assistance, directed and reviewed by a human author.

Why not just search the file for font names

Because you get a wrong answer that looks right.

Every PowerPoint theme carries a script fallback table, a list of fonts to reach for if the deck ever contains Japanese, Devanagari, Khmer, Syriac and so on. It’s there whether or not a single such character exists in the presentation.

Searching a real deck for font references finds 39 fonts. It uses two. The other 37 are that table, and a tool that lists them will send you off to install Mongolian Baiti for a slide that says “Welcome” in Calibri.

The second half of the problem is that decks name faces, not families:

Three false alarms out of four. This tool resolves the names first, so “missing” means missing.

What it does

Scans slides, layouts, masters, notes, charts and SmartArt, resolves theme references through the theme the slide actually inherits, and sorts what it finds by how much it matters: used on a slide, inherited from a layout or theme, or only present somewhere incidental.

Checks what’s installed, using the browser’s font-access API where it exists and text-width measurement everywhere else.

Finds replacements across two catalogues (1,942 Google Fonts families, plus 119 more that Google doesn’t carry), matched after the name is normalised, with near-matches offered when there isn’t an exact one.

Substitutes, and the distinction that matters

The fonts most often missing are the ones a deck picks up just by being written on Windows or a Mac: Calibri, Cambria, Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Georgia. None of them may be redistributed and none are on Google Fonts.

So the app offers metric-compatible stand-ins instead: Carlito for Calibri, Caladea for Cambria, Arimo for Arial, Tinos for Times New Roman. These have the same advance widths as the original, so line breaks hold and text stays inside its box.

Where there’s only a visually similar face (Open Sans for Segoe UI), it tells you so. That swap will move your line breaks, and being told the deck is fixed when it isn’t is worse than being told the font is missing.

Adobe Fonts, and the failure that looks fine

Adobe fonts can never be bundled. Adobe’s terms say they aren’t compatible with workflows that transfer font files to another computer, and there’s no API that serves the files anyway. So for a missing one the app gives the reason and links to the family page.

The desktop app also catches the version of this that looks fine: a font Creative Cloud syncs onto your machine is installed here and nowhere else, so the deck looks perfect for you and breaks at the venue.

The app tells it apart from an ordinary installed font by where its file lives (Adobe keeps synced faces in its own folder), which is why Times New Roman doesn’t get the warning just for being sold on Adobe Fonts too.

Embedded fonts

PowerPoint’s “embed fonts in the file” doesn’t store a TTF. It stores EOT, and what happens next depends on who wrote the file:

Either way the font travels with the deck, so it’ll render wherever the .pptx goes. The distinction only matters for what can go in the bundle.

The bundle, and the two traps it heads off

There’s no such thing as a single self-extracting archive that runs on every OS, so the bundle is a plain .zip with one small script per platform, a manifest saying where each font came from and under what licence, and a README covering the two ways these usually go wrong:

• macOS Gatekeeper. Anything extracted from a downloaded zip inherits a quarantine flag, and double-clicking the installer gets “cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer”. That doesn’t mean the script’s broken. The README gives both ways through, plus the no-script route of dropping the fonts on Font Book.
• Windows Mark-of-the-Web. PowerShell refuses to run a script that came out of a downloaded archive, for the same reason.

The installers write to the per-user font directory, so no administrator password is needed.

Video and audio

Below the fonts, the app lists the deck’s video and sound.

• Each embedded file, with its codec, resolution, frame rate and length, the slides it plays on, and how it’s set to play (automatically or on click, looping, full screen, volume). Two pills say whether PowerPoint will play it on Windows and on the Mac. “Needs codec pack” means an optional Microsoft Store extension (HEVC, AV1, VP9); assume the venue machine hasn’t got it. “Check it” means it might play and might not, so try it on the show machine.
• Anything that needs the internet, in red: online videos, web add-ins, Flash objects and links to video sites. Streaming sites are often blocked on venue networks. SharePoint, Stream and OneDrive for work also need PowerPoint signed in to an account with access. The fix is the same for all of them: download the video and insert it as a file.
• Linked videos: the deck records a path on the author’s computer instead of holding the file. They only play if the file is at that same path on the show machine.

Save takes one file out; Save all gives you a zip of every file, named by slide, plus MEDIA.txt listing which slide each belongs to and its playback settings. The files are byte for byte what’s inside the deck. If a clip was trimmed in PowerPoint, the saved file is the full original, and the trim is listed in MEDIA.txt.

Hide the slides that play media is for shows where video runs from a media server or playback machine instead of PowerPoint. Tick the slides (the ones with video are ticked for you), then download a copy with them hidden. The slides are still in the deck, just skipped in the slideshow, and your original file isn’t changed.

If something is wrong