Ahh, PowerPoint to Flash. Isn’t it great? You may want to convert your PowerPoint file to Flash for a whole variety of reasons. So you open PowerPoint and access that fantastic Articulate menu. You sit back and let Articulate Presenter do its magic.

Done.

Time to see the results of your conversion. Slide 1. Check. Slide 2. Check. Look at that accuracy! The Flash looks better than the original. Slide 3. What’s that? The font you had formatted to be bold in PowerPoint is not showing as bold in the Flash output?

Here’s why: You may have the base version of the font used installed on your computer, but you probably don’t have the stylized version of the same font installed. (This applies not only to bold styles, but to italics and even bold italics.)

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Navigate on your computer to C:\WINDOWS\Fonts.

2. Locate the font in question. Let’s say it’s Verdana.
3. Look for all files that begin with “Verdana” and see what’s there.
4. If your text is not showing up as bold in Flash, then you probably won’t see Verdana Bold in the list.
5. Locate your Windows installation CD (or the original source of the font) and reinstall.
6. Close PowerPoint and open it again, republish, and voila! Your bold font should now be reflected in your Flash output.

Alternatively, if you don’t have your Windows CD or font media handy, choose another font — one for which you definitely have the associated font style installed on your system.

See also: TrueType Fonts.

(Thanks to Articulate Customer Support Engineer Justin Wilcox for suggesting this blog entry!)