Now, there’s nothing wrong with Calibri; it’s a very nice font indeed. But it may not be for everyone. If you prefer to use a different default font for your documents, you can configure Word to change the default font to any other installed font that you choose. Here’s how to do it!

Change the Default Font in Word for Mac To get started with changing the default font in Microsoft Word for Mac, first launch the app and then select Format Font from the menu bar at the top of the screen. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Command-D.

Zxx Font For Mac

A new “Font” window will appear. Make sure you’re on the Font tab and locate the Font drop-down menu near the top-left section of the window. If you’ve never changed the font in the past, you’ll see that Calibri is selected as the default font.

To change it, just click on the drop-down entry to open the menu and choose a new default font, such as Times New Roman or, if you want to troll your colleagues,. In addition to changing the default font itself, you can also configure the default font style and size.

For example, in the screenshot below, I’ve chosen Times New Roman, in bold, colored dark red, at a size of 14 points. Changing these options only changes them in your current document. To save this as your new default font click the Default button in the lower-left corner of the window. Word will ask you to confirm whether you want to affect just your current document or all documents you create. If you’d like the settings you applied in the last step to be your default, make sure the radio button next to All documents based on the Normal template is on, then click OK.

Now, all new documents you create will start with the font choices you made previously. Of course, this won’t change existing files, and it also won’t affect any Word documents you create that start from templates, as those have their own fonts and styles configured. This is neat, though, especially if you want to get away from Calibri! Just please don’t use Comic Sans, OK? I was kidding.

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There are people out there that believe a font like the one i used in the above image can be used to encrypt messages and keep it’s contents hidden from the NSA or whoever it’s meant to be hidden from. This is not a correct assumption.

If you rely on techniques like this to secure your messages please stop. I’ll explain.

Here are two text documents with a simple ‘abcdefg’ in it. One uses Helvetica, the other uses a mix of. While the ZXX sample is harder to read for us, it is still very doable. Our brains are smart enough to read between the garble and put it all together in a way that forms words that make sense, we just have to read a little bit slower. The ZXX sample may confuse a machine though if it is in a picture.

A machine will only see ‘sample.jpg’ (the name of the image above) and even if a type of font recognition is used, it may fail. If the image is somehow flagged, a human will open it and read it’s contents. If the ZXX font is used in an email or in a text document attached to an email unfortunately the font you use won’t make any difference. The text may look completely different but the underlying code is the same.

Open up any text file in a hex editor and you will see that a=61, b=62, c=63 etc. It would be far easier for a machine to just focus on the code that makes up a document rather than trying to figure out what kind of font is used. ‘abcdefg’ using Helvetica ‘abcdefg’ using ZXX A machine will see “4E 69 63 65 20 74 72 79 20 62 75 74 20 69 20 77 61 73 20 61 62 6C 65 20 74 6F 20 72 65 61 64 20 74 68 69 73 2E” which translates back to “Nice try but i was able to read this.” even though i used hard to read fonts, mixed different fonts, made some letters 1pt small and white etc. It doesn’t matter. In the case of a font like this being used in an image, all the administrator of a system has to do is make the system aware of the font that is being used.

Once the machine knows that the letter ‘a’ can look like this, this and that, it will read the text from your image in a split second. This is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The creator of the ZXX font has put a lot of work in to it’s creation for the purpose of and while it may fool some consumer products, i highly doubt it will cause an issue for government style machines. Even if it has in the past or currently is going undetected, it really won’t be for long. So, use fonts like this to make a statement or use it because it looks cool and different but don’t use it because you think it secures your message in any way. Feedback and comments welcome.

Bena on October 16, 2013 A better and even simpler way to hide a message is to write it in handwriting on a piece of paper, scan it and send the pdf. Of course, the message could be read by someone who intercepted it, but it would take a human being to carry out the task, and the NSA has a budget.

I doubt whether it could be machine read. So unless you are a high profile target, what you have written won’t be in a data base in any kind of meaningful form. And if you (or your recipient) can’t or won’t encrypt, its probably second best.