Text bunches up at left of slide

Text suddenly bunches up

The text on all slides sporadically and suddenly bunches up at the left of the line (all characters piled on top of each other) while working on the document. Nothing in particular seems to be triggering this.

After restarting Powerpoint the display is OK again for a while.

The common factor in the slides is that all use a Postscript (ie, not TrueType) version of Frutiger since this was introduced as the corporate standard. Previously most ppts created were using Arial or Times New Roman (both TrueType fonts).

Solution

The problem turned out to be that the computers had Adobe Type Manager (ATM) Light installed, unnecessarily as it turns out.

Removing it, fixing the registry (as it doesn't uninstall properly) and letting Windows's default renderer handle the fonts seems to have fixed the problem.

Background

Prior to Windows 2000, you needed to install Adobe Type Manager (ATM) software in order to use PostScript (aka Type 1, Adobe) fonts. Windows 2000 and up include native support for most PostScript fonts; ATM is only needed in order to use Multiple Master PostScript fonts. If you're not sure whether you have any of these, you probably don't.

ATM Light Version 4.1 is designed for all Windows versions from Windows 95 through Windows XP, but 4.0 and earlier versions weren't designed for Windows 2000 and XP and could cause problems such as those described above and others..

Find more information about ATM LIght from Adobe here

If you're experiencing problems like those above, this points to an ATM Light Updater that may fix this and other problems.

This describes more troubleshooting steps

---