PowerPoint crashes / complains about missing fonts

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Problem

When opening PowerPoint, it complains that a font is missing (the message is "The M S XXXXX... Font is unavailable on your computer, so PowerPoint substituted another font")

XXXX is the name of the font, and will probably appear as gibberish characters.

or

PowerPoint may crash when opening presentations.

Solution

• There are seven fonts that are required for PowerPoint 2004 to run properly. They are:
• Arial
• MS PGothic
• PMingLiu
• Gulim
• Simun
• Lucida Grande
• Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro W3 [the filename isn't in English, but it's included with OS X]

You will get the error that a font is missing if any of these are removed. The obvious solution is to restore these fonts from OS X & the Office 2004 CD.

Note that in Office 2004 SP2 (11.2.0), the issue has been made less severe because there is now a "Do not show this dialog again" option in the missing fonts dialog, so that users are not forced to click through several of them each time a presentation is opened.

See this Knowledge Base article for other information

Another description of the problem from a user who solved it

Wolfram, a PPT user in Munich, wrote:

I had the same problem with a German OS 10.3.5. It was specific to PowerPoint and it appeared after installing Service Pack 11.1.0. Before that PowerPoint 11.0.0 worked well.

Reinstalling did not help. Apparently PowerPoint could not find 5 Asian fonts, since I had to kill 5 alert windows at PowerPoint start-up.

I compared my System –> Library –> Fonts with another machine, where 11.1.0 works and found 8 Asian fonts, that were not installed on my machine:

ヒラギノ丸ゴ Pro W4.otf
ヒラギノ明朝 Pro W3.otf
ヒラギノ明朝 Pro W6.otf
ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3.otf
ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W6.otf
ヒラギノ角ゴ Std W8.otf
华文细黑.ttf
华文黑体.ttf

Since the system folder cannot be changed, I copied them to my User, Library, Fonts folder and the problem was gone.

After writing the solution below I went to the Apple font manager menu and found three new Asian fonts listed:

• Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro
• Hiraginu Maru Gothic Pro
• Hiraginu Mincho Pro

You may deactivate the last two. If you deactivate the first, the problem will return.

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