I usually don’t blog about ODF applications, but decided to write this post to help people that are angry with OpenOffice, because it mess with the text in slides.

The main symptom of the problem is to have the text of the slides unformatted, usually being many times larger than the area of the slide and there is a very simple explanation to that: You used a font that is installed on your computer but not on the computer where the presentation will be viewed !

This problem typically occurs when editing a presentation on Windows and try to use Linux to present it, but in fact it can also occur when you change the computer between edition and presentation (even using the same operating system and same version of OpenOffice).

Many people complain about this problem to me (especially other speakers in events), although most blame OpenOffice, there are some folks who say that this is an ODF issue (indeed, the people still very confused with the standard and the standard implementation, but this could be explored on another post). Indeed, the problem is that small piece that causes 98% of computer systems problems,  the small piece that lies between the keyboard and the chair, also known as “user” (yep, you :D).

Seeing that I used to do many presentations in different places (always using ODF), and that I almost never know what I’ll find when I come to the site of the event, I always use in my presentations a font that has never let me down: Bitstream Vera Sans.

I hope this tip help many people who are having this problem and would like to know if someone knows any other font that is also widely available (please, leave its name on comments).