How to copy a font

A font is a particular style of text, like ‘Helvetica’ or ‘Times’.

Sometimes you might make a keynote presentation on one computer, but then you copy it to a different computer, and it doesn’t display properly. This may be because the font you used is not on the second computer. A font is not included in a document when you save it.  If the new computer doesn’t have the right font, it won’t be able to display your text properly. It will try to substitute a different font, which may not look good! This means if you are using a strange font, you may need to copy the font to the new computer. Here’s how.

1. Open ‘Font Book’. It is on every mac computer in the ‘Applications’ Folder.

Whew you open Font Book it will give you a list of all the fonts on your computer.

2. Find the font you want to copy and control-click on the font name. There will be an option to ‘Show in Finder’, which will take you to the location of the font file on your computer!

After you have clicked on ‘Show in Finder’ The font you are after will be highlighted. (See below)

3. You now need to copy this font to the computer you want to use it on.

To do this you can drag the font to the mail app, to email it to the new computer.Or you can drag it to a thumb drive, to copy it to the new computer. Or you can use idisk or dropbox.  Whatever method you used to copy the keynote file across, you can use to copy the font.

4. When you get the font onto the new computer, simply double click the font, and it will automatically open in Font Book on the new computer as follows:

5. Now click the ‘Install Font’ Button and the font will be installed onto the new computer ready to go!

HINT 1: pdf files DON’T need the fonts to be sent separately, the font is included in the pdf. All other documents, word, pages, keynote, illustrator etc need the font to be copied if you want to read the document properly on a different computer.

HINT 2: There are standard mac fonts included with any mac computer, you can see a list here, and if you use one of them they will work on any mac. Other fonts that you have installed yourself from font collections or the web, you will need to copy.