What to do when you can’t print the Aptos font?

Last year, Microsoft introduced a new main font for their suite of Office-apps named “Aptos”. Unfortunately, this change has lead to some problems because people are having problems printing text in the font when trying to use both Adobe PDF and Microsoft PDF. What’s going on?

The problem is that the Aptos font technically isn’t installed on your device. “But Steven”, you might say, “I can use it in Word. I am looking at it, right now.”

Are you, though? Are you, really?

Microsoft has recently come up with something new which they call “Cloud Fonts”. You can read about them here: Cloud fonts in Office – Microsoft Support

I’m not sure what problem “Cloud Fonts” are trying to solve outside of the context of websites. Contrary to the claims made in the article, because as you can read in the article Cloud Fonts are only available to Microsoft 365 users which suggests that the font won’t be available to people using the retail version of Office.

To achieve this, the fonts aren’t installed on your PC but loaded from the Microsoft CDN. You’ve got the option in your Office application to them to your device, but even then they won’t be installed as system fonts. So how can we install these fonts as system fonts in Windows?

I haven’t checked the Microsoft legalese on distributing fonts or what you can or can’t do with them outside of the scope of Office. So for legal reasons, I’m just going to mention a few steps you can do on your computer. If you happen to end up in a folder where these Apto fonts are located and can be copied, that was an unintentional result.

1. Start by opening your Windows terminal
   
2. Navigate to the following folder, where <Your Username> is your Windows full username (You’ll likely see C;\Users\YourUserName as you open the terminal, so make a note)
   

cd C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FontCache\4\CloudFonts

Once you’re in this folder, you’ll find folders of all the “Cloud Fonts” that are currently installed on your device. You can now copy them and install them as system fonts and see if that solves your problem.