Squeeze Fonts? (PPT2000)

Topic

New Reply

One of the things that annoys me about PPT is its lack of the ability to squeeze fonts together a little to let me fit more on a line. Generally I am using Arial and the best I can do to get that one line that doesn’t quite fit is to shrink the space between words. Lot’s of other programs, including Word, allow you to squeeze fonts. OpenOffice’s Presentation does too, but when you port them back to PPT, they unsqueeze.

Using a smaller font or different font is typically too jarring an effect.

Anyhow, it seems to me that it ought to be possible to take the Arial font and a font editor of some kind and create a font that is pre-squozen. I know that there is already Arial Narrow, but it is a visually different font. Does anyone know how I could do this? Or is it in some way impossible?

Reply | Quote

Replies

This might sound a bit bizarre, but if you put the material you want ‘squeezed’ into another object (eg a Word document or Excel spreadsheet) and embed that into your slide, you can achieve the results you want – even if the material in the embedded object isn’t ‘squeezed’ – simply re-size the embedded object so that it’s aspect ratio squeezes/stretches in whatever direction you want.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Reply | Quote

Hmmm. Now that is a bizarre concept. I guess I will give it a try and see how it works out. Thanks.

Reply | Quote

I have faced this problem as well. Maybe I’m not understanding completely, but I think there could be an even greater problem. Isn’t the problem with the “bizarre” solution, that the font characteristics completely change- that is, the font begins to look like a mono-spaced font rather than the original?

Reply | Quote

Hi Shades,

Yes, the font characteristics do change, but they remain proportional (unless you used a mono-spaced font to begin with).

What happens with the method I suggested is that the entire embedded object becomes stretched/compressed. The font’s characters and spaces in the embedded object are both affected. Presumably, Windows outputs the skewed fonts as either the original with some of the metrics changed, or as a completely new vector graphic – I don’t know which. Either way, this method allows effects that can’t readily be achieved any other way. For example, to get a 12pt font that’s only as wide as it’s 10pt equivalent, you could embed an object with the 10pt font and simply stretch it vertically by 20%. You can also get font sizes that MS Apps don’t support (eg 12.75pt), because you can stretch/compress an embedded object in as little as 1% increments.

Cheers

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Reply | Quote