I'm creating design templates for my organisation, using Microsoft Office, but am having difficulty choosing a typeface.
Microsoft's typography page gives some useful lists of which faces are included with different incarnations. For example, Office Pro 2003 has the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/product.aspx?PID=143
It's decent enough, containing several weights of Bodoni, Franklin Gothic, Gill Sans and so on.
Word 2000, on the other hand, contains a far smaller selection:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/product.aspx?PID=143
Other versions (eg. the Microsoft Works series) appear to contain something in between.
My organisation uses Office Pro 2003, so I can choose from the longer list. But we will need to be able to send documents outside our organisation. In these cases, I can't be sure that the fonts I use will be available. The recipient could be using any kind of .doc viewer, but it appears that they'll only get the full range of typefaces with Microsoft's more expensive bundles.
Has anyone else been in this situation, and how have you handled it? It appears my choices are:
1) A two-tiered Word experience. For example, I could specify Gill Sans for use throughout. This would work for everyone in my organisation, and most people we email documents to (who will be in organisations with similar IT systems). But for some recipients, the fonts won't be available. Which fonts will Word substitute, and will the degradation be elegant?
2) Choose from one of Microsoft's core fonts for web. I'm confident this solution would work in the same way on any machine, but I'd be limited to fonts like Arial, Georgia, Verdana, Times ... Comic Sans. This is undesirable to me from a design perspective, but should I eschew such concerns in favour of a consistent appearance for all viewers?
Comments and insight are very welcome.
