How do I turn a PowerPoint into a PDF that looks right?

A deck is the file people most often need as a PDF and least often check afterwards. It gets emailed to a client, attached to a proposal, or printed as a handout — and the faults only show up on somebody else's screen, after it has gone.

What comes across

One slide, one page. The page takes the slide's own dimensions, so a widescreen deck produces widescreen pages. It will not be letterboxed onto A4 unless you ask for that.

Everything you can see on the slide. Text, images, charts, shapes, tables, the background, and anything sitting on the slide master.

Hidden slides stay hidden. A slide hidden in the deck does not become a page.

What does not come across

Animations and transitions. A build that reveals four bullets one at a time becomes one page with four bullets on it. A PDF page does not move, so there is nothing to convert them into. If the build carried meaning — a before and after, a reveal — split it across real slides before converting, or the point disappears.

Embedded video and audio. They become the poster image, or a blank rectangle where the player was.

Anything off the canvas. Objects parked on the grey area beside a slide are not on the slide, so they are not on the page. That is usually a relief and occasionally a surprise.

PowerPoint to PDF accepts .pptx, .ppt and .odp.

Why a deck moves on somebody else's machine

This is the fault worth understanding, because it is the one that makes a careful deck look careless.

A .pptx file does not contain its fonts. It contains the names of fonts and expects the machine opening it to have them. When that machine does not, something else is substituted — and the replacement has different letter widths, so every line breaks in a different place. A heading that fitted on one line wraps onto two, pushes down the text below it, and lands on top of your image.

Converting to PDF is the cure, because a PDF carries the fonts inside it. Once it is a PDF the layout is fixed and everyone sees what you saw.

But the substitution has to not happen during the conversion, which is why the converter is given the metric-compatible families: Carlito stands in for Calibri and Caladea for Cambria, letter width for letter width, and Liberation covers Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. Those are the fonts most decks are actually set in, and a metric-compatible stand-in occupies exactly the same space as the font it replaces, so the lines break where they always did.

Handouts, and the page-size question

Two different jobs get confused here.

If the PDF is for reading on screen or projecting, leave it at the deck's own size. Widescreen pages, one slide each, nothing wasted.

If it is for printing as a handout, you want several slides per sheet — and that is a page-layout job, not a conversion one. Convert first, then combine the pages: SmartShrink puts two or four slides on a sheet and tells you what each option costs in legibility before you commit.

Before you send it

• Open the PDF and look at the longest heading in the deck. If a font was substituted badly, that is where it shows first.
• Check the last page. A deck with a trailing empty slide converts it into a blank page nobody wants at the end of a proposal.
• Check the size. An image-heavy deck can produce a large PDF; Compress PDF will usually take a great deal off it without touching the text.