Participating Frequently

Answered

Times New Roman TTF replaced with OTF in InDesign 21.0, causing missing font errors

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
October 30, 2025
26 replies
9568 views

All my books (several hundred) are formatted using the Times New Roman TTF font. The new version of InDesign 21.0 changes that to Times New Roman OTF.
Fortunately, version 20.0 is still installed. I know from experience that strange things can happen in updates.. However, the problem with the latest update has also been introduced in that version.
OTF is only available with a licence, which I do not have.
I would appreciate some help.
Cor van Wijgerden

Performance

Correct answer Dmytro301376413pen

The same issue with my InDesign 20.5 / Windows 11. I installed Times New Roman from Adobe (https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/times-new-roman) and replaced the font in the document. It works perfectly now.

OsakaWebbie

Inspiring

I’m now the latest victim of this. I did “Replace Fonts → select each TNR(OTF) and Replace All with corresponding TNR” and the pink disappeared in the document. But when I tried to export a PDF, it was doing nothing visibly. Then I looked at the Background Tasks and saw that the export was queued behind all the “Adding Font” tasks for both my open documents.

There doesn’t appear to be any way to kill those stuck background tasks - only the export has an X on the right side.

When I then tried to close the document, I got this:

After cancelling just the export task, I was able to save and close both documents, but hilariously, those Adding Font tasks were still running with no document open! Fortunately, closing InDesign and reopening the documents worked, and I was then able to export a PDF. But good grief, this font thing is annoying.

Shannon Reeves

Participant

Hi all, cross-posting my fix from

with the hope that the same process that worked for my Calibri (OTF) issues can help you with your Times New Roman (OTF) issues. As noted below I have only resolved Calibri (OTF) failing to remap on form fields using Find/Replace Font, but the process described seems likely to work for other Windows System Fonts. Good luck 🤞🏽

Hi folks.

Like Tom and others I have also been impacted badly by this issue with hundreds of form fields for client projects broken.

Thankfully I have found a fix which appears to resolve the issue by exporting to IDML and editing the Fonts XML directly -- not as difficult as it sounds. I understand others are having issues with Times New Roman and possibly other Windows System fonts. I haven’t tested those cases but hope the same process applied to other fonts can clean up those issues for you as well.

Here are the steps I followed:

Use Find/Replace Font to remap Calibri (OTF) to Calibri where it can be remapped. If you have no text in Calibri (i.e. form fields only) probably a good idea to add some temporarily to the document to make sure the correct version of Calibri is registered in the document.
Save the file to IDML.
Rename the .idml file extension to .zip
Unzip the archive
Browse to the Resources folder and open the Fonts.xml file with a text editor
Find the <FontFamily> tag which contains the Name=”Calibri (OTF)” property. It should be followed by another <FontFamily> tag with Name=”Calibri”, assuming you have some correctly mapped Calibri text in your document as well (see Step 1).
Delete the entire section, from the opening <FontFamily Self=”xxxxxx” Name=”Calibri (OTF)”> tag to the closing </FontFamily> tag.
Save the file.
Pack all of the files and folders you unzipped in Step 4 into a new .zip file (don’t accidentally include the original zip file, if it is still in the same location as the files and folders you unzipped). Name it as you like, e.g. YourProject_Clean.zip
Change the file extension of the new zip file to .idml
Open the IDML file in InDesign. If you have trouble opening it check carefully that the new IDML file’s contents (viewed by changing the extension to .zip) match the contents of the one InDesign created for you in Step 2.
Save your converted IDML file to a new InDesign file.

This has at least for me resulted in clean files with all form fields correctly mapped to whichever style of Calibri was originally applied before the update.

I really hope these steps work for others. Please post if you have success!

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thanks for sharing the details here. I wanted to let you know that this is a known bug, and our product team is currently working on a fix. The issue appears related to recent Windows font updates, which changed how InDesign recognizes certain system fonts (like Times New Roman TTF vs OTF), causing missing font warnings in existing documents.

In the meantime, please consider upvoting and following the related UserVoice report here:
[ID-4272938] After installing a Windows 11 update, InDesign is unable to find the Times New Roman and Calibri fonts – Adobe InDesign

We appreciate your patience, and I’ll share updates here as soon as they’re available.

Abhishek

Bilel Ayadi

Participant

Hello Everyone

I have found this as solution:

The removal of the folders under these paths:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Adobe\Acrobat\
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Acrobat\

I have as well tested this on 12 different devices, with different “Font” errors.

molebot

Participant

Has anyone tried this method? I'm still uninstalling Microsoft updates!--endfragment>!--startfragment>

merritth74903606

Participating Frequently

I tried this today...to no avail. Same font problems..

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Has anyone on Windows experimented with patching forward to the latest Windows Update to see whether that fixes this TNR problem?

Mike Witherell

D

defaultk0shk10brvbv

Participating Frequently

I have the latest Windows Update - I have not had the TNR problem since Windows updated to TNR v 7.11 (I think), which was before this update. However, an external contractor on a Mac has the very same problem with Source Sans 3 when they open my files. I made sure to delete the Google Fonts version of Source Sans 3 from the Windows font folder and activate the Adobe Fonts version of Source Sans 3 before packaging and sending them my file. InDesign at my end is definitely sourcing the font via Font Sync, as evinced by the information in the Search/Replace fonts window.

River7567

Participating Frequently

And can we not mark this as "resolved" because the issue isn't resolved, at least not yet. Seems a bit premature...

G

gosiaAuthor

Participating Frequently

The problem is far from solved; in fact, it's even worse. After the latest updates to Windows and InDesign, repaired files work, but suddenly a message appears saying that there is a conflict with Calibri Bold.
It has been exactly three months since I reported this issue with TNR.

What a sadness, isn't it?

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

As of today, Nov 20, my win11 machine shows that windows patch installed on the 11th of November. Running Windows Update shows nothing newer yet as of today.

Mike Witherell

D

davidz1290389

Participant

From what I've gathered, Windows has updated Times New Roman from v7.05 to v7.10 and either InDesign isn't recognizing OpenType or the new font is bugged and has lost OpenType.

River7567

Participating Frequently

The plot thickens. Thank you for sharing this info! Still not sure which company, Microsoft or Adobe, needs to deploy a fix... I could see this going either way.