I usually love these kinds of war stories, but this one was anticlimactic. This would have been the first instinct of anyone who's ever tried to open a PowerPoint they got over e-mail – "oh, one printer shows the wrong font? I bet the font's not bundled, and one machine just happens to already have it."
I thought of that, but I have to say I wouldn't have thought about the printer's font cache. I didn't even know they had one. Then again, I try to avoid printers as much as I can :)
Author here. I've opened a ton of PowerPoint presentations (God help me) but this was the first time I've run into this issue. :) I usually crawl around inside of Web services / infrastructures while troubleshooting.
Yeah, I think it's interesting because this maybe isn't obvious when approaching with a network-guy mindset. A workstation guy or printer guy would probably check this first thing.
Indeed, my background was in administering Internet services (Web, mail, DNS, netnews, etc.) This was my first time troubleshooting a printing issue professionally. I was the only UNIX sysadmin in the shop and I was hired in as a "Network consultant" because they didn't have a slot for a Unix sysadmin -- didn't know what one was, even. But the (new) Director of Engineering specifically hired a sysadmin.
