My staff are suddenly being told to sign up to CC to use Adobe Fonts

[defaultngzyhs43i3hv]

We are a very small business, and while I have full access to the Creative Cloud suite, my three staff are all on subscriptions to Acrobat Pro DC - which up until two days ago allowed them access to Adobe Fonts as well.

As of yesterday, they can't activate any fonts - even though previously activated fonts are showing up in Word etc - but they don't work.

As manager, I go to the Admin Console and I can't make any changes to ensure that they can access Adobe Fonts. I'm paying for them to be able to do their work and we're losing hours becuase they can't deliver client projects because fonts they'd previously licensed are suddenly not working!

I've logged in and out of the CC App and their online accounts as them - but nothing I tweak will tell their accounts that they're able to access the Fonts side of things. What's really weird is that even if they log in under their Business profile (rather than the new Personal profile), when they reach Adobe Fonts, it seems to think that they're there under their Personal profiles, not their business ones.
Short of asking each of them to uninstal and reinstal CC and Acrobat Pro, does anyone have any ideas how to fix this - it's driving us all crazy! (Please also bear in mind that we're all work-from-home people, not highly tech-savvy, so this is adding even more stress.)

[Bani Verma]

Hi there, 

We recently introduced profiles to your sign-in experience to help you better manage your content across multiple plans, it sounds like this might have happened due to that. 

I would recommend contacting the support team, click on the chat icon on the bottom right corner of this page: https://www.adobe.com/about-adobe/contact.html 

[Moof grafisch ontwerp]

I have a teams account for myself and my colleague. The full package. Indesign, photoshop, ... creative cloud so. But since today I can no longer get fonts activated in my layouts. They are activated in my creative account but they do not load in indesign. I cannot get in touch via chat. Apparently I can only contact them via the forum. This frustrates me enormously. help?

[jenniferm255076]

Hi Moof

Not sure if you saw Bani's reply to my original post about the same problem, but hopefully that link worked for you so you could get the chat thing started. (https://www.adobe.com/about-adobe/contact.html)

I originally tried calling a support line - but it rang for an hour so I gave up. I had to work through the chat box and ended up being passed to three different responders, then the case got elevated. I then received an email so I took a lot of screenshots, marked up where the issues were, and sent them back. Eventually a tech guy called, investigated again and I think understood that it's not something we're doing our end - that it's something happening the Adobe end. 

I think it's to do with the new 'management console' that's been rolled out. What I'm seeing is that access to fonts seems to have disconnected from the 'business profile' of each user and attached itself to the 'personal profile' of each user - and of course none of my people have a paid personal profile, so their fonts won't work. The moment they click through from any part of their business login to the fonts area, it diverts them to their personal profile. (Ironically, my account seems to be working. Go figure.)

I'm surprised so few people seem to be having this problem - I'm sure there are others out there wondering what's gone wrong but don't know how to fix it. Or else they haven't yet noticed there's an issue, or they just think some fonts are glitching.

I last spoke with someone on Friday, and he said he'd talk with the people his end and get back to me Friday or today (Monday). There's no email, so I suspect there'll be a phone call some time today. I am just hoping it's been fixed across the board in the meantime - if you're lucky, you won't have to do anything, it will just be working by now! I shall keep the fingers crossed for you, but if it's not working, do your best to report it - you need to be able to do your work. Good luck!

[jenniferm255076]

Thank you, Bani - I did manage to report it last week and it's still being investigated as far as I know. 

[jonr74706289]

We have the same issue

11 x acrobat Pro DC licences through our businesses a/c, since the creation of separate business and personal profiles ...... we cannot access the fonts on our desktop, we're logged in as biz in creative cloud, acrobat pro DC

But as you say, we try and activate the font and defaults to logging us in to the personal profile on the online fonts page and there is no way to login as our business profile and activate the font

We're going round and round the houses with adobe support who are telling us it is a known issue but offering no solution at all

We have asked that they supply us on a temp basis with 11 x personal profile acrobat DC licences, but thus far they have refused and said we need to pay for them.

No current known workaround

this is crazy .....

So we have fonts that we use on most correspondence that we are unable to access and use

Getting very very frustrating .....

Jon

[jonr74706289]

and you can't even get into the billing element of Adobe either since the change, as I am in our business a/c

have gone into billing history, and it asks to login as your personal profile - brings up lists of invoices, and when you click on them .... it sends you to another login screen and then shows an error

losing the will to live adobe ...... (this was just to get invoice details, as we are on the phone to someone at billing to go through the issue and try and get resolution to having personal acrobat Pro DC licences FOC until resolution, and we can't even get our details accessed by anyone within billing off co. name, address, email .... can't find us!!!)

[Vikrant R]

I think I understand what's going on here.

Before the upgrade to business storage, all the entitlements that a user had were adding up into a single account. So if you had Acrobat DC, you would actually get Acrobat DC + benefits of a free Creative Cloud plan, which included Fonts.

After the upgrade, the entitlements have been split into the Personal and Business profiles. The Creative Cloud free features remain in the personal profile, while the Acrobat DC plan (provided by the organization) moves to the Business profile. When you sign in with the Business profile, you're unable to access Fonts because the Acrobat DC plan does not include Fonts, which are only included with Creative Cloud plans. Also, when you sign-in on fonts.adobe.com, the website recognizes that your business profile doe not have access to fonts, so it defaults to the Personal profile.

I obviously don't have a solution. I'm not sure if there is a way to add-on Fonts into Acrobat DC. Or if there is a version of Acrobat DC plan that includes fonts, which you can possibly upgrade to. I'll try and find out.

[jonr74706289]

Hi Vikrant

Thanks for the response

It does look like that is what is happening, albeit each of us IS able to login to a business creative cloud account .... both on our desktop, and online - or at least 4 of us have tried it, and have access to it ....

So it is showing that we have business creative cloud, but when I look on our admin console for the biz account, it shows 11 acrobat pro DC under "document cloud", and a single indesign licence under "creative cloud" (which is with one of our team members, and funnily enough he doesn't have the issue all of the others of us are having!)

So how do we "link" the acrobat pro DC licence that each user has, to a creative cloud a/c / licence so that we resolve this issue?

As I paid in April 21 £166 per licence per annum for an acrobat pro DC licence (11 x this was the full renewal) .... and if I was to sign up today to a teams creative cloud account and have 11 licences of acrobat pro DC the cost would be almost exactly the same and maybe this would resolve the issue

so cannot understand how our existing acrobat pro DC licences aren't just allowing us to login to fonts, when we have access to business creative cloud 

[Vikrant R]

I think we understand what's causig the issue. And considering your colleague you has a Teams license for InDesign isn't facing it, confirms it. The InDesign license includes access to Fonts while Acrobat DC does not. So, I don't think buying Acrobat DC licences will solve your problem.

I grabbed these screenshots from: https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/business-plans.html

I don't understand the part of "business creative cloud" you mention. I don't see any CC plans (other than InDesign) for your team account. When you say you're able to sign in to Creative Cloud, it's most likely automatically selecting your Personal profile (because the Business profile does not any CC plans) and defaulting you to the free Creative Cloup plan.

If all these users had any teams CC product that includes Fonts, then the CC services will get enabled.

The least expensive seems to be InCopy. But multiply that with the number of licenses and it'll add up. An expensive workaround but will work. The other thing could be if you require a limited/specific fonts, you could try and purchase these directly from the foundry.

[jonr74706289]

Hi Vikrant, thanks for the response

useful

here's a screengrab from my Creative cloud desktop login - you see the co. logo in the top right corner, this is my business profile

just to also show, I have a personal profile creative cloud - this is my pic in the top right corner

so this is what I mean when I say I can login (as can others) into creative cloud online and on desktop as their business and personal profile.

and when I logout of my biz profile it warns me that I will not be able to use the fonts (the same fonts it currently cannot show as active for me on my business profile!)

when I go to sign into creative cloud desktop, it gives me the option to select my personal or business profile (& the other users have this too)

so this is where I am a little perplexed with you saying that we do not have creative cloud biz accounts - as we do, as we can sign in on desktop

this is my personal desktop creative cloud screen grab, as I say .... note the different pic in the top right corner

so the plot thickens for me .....

your suggestion to purchase incopy at £4-off pcm for each user, to get a creative cloud biz account ..... well we shouldn't have to do that really, as one of the options it gives you to get a creative cloud biz account for teams is to purchase licences for acrobat pro DC .....!  which we plainly already have!

so surely someone in adobe can either:

- set us up 11 x creative cloud biz accounts and link them to our current adobe acrobat pro DC licences

- give us a refund on our 11 licences, and we re-sign up first to CC biz and add in 11 x acrobat pro dc licences (I never like options like this, as something will go wrong I am sure!)

but as I say above, it looks like we already have them .... but maybe they're not talking properly to fonts

I have just spent £100-odd to buy 10 licences of the particular font that we are in desperate need to use ..... as this is causing real issues
and have then tried to import it into my biz creative cloud, and I get this error message
(I bought from myfonts as I had an a/c with them)

so ....

- we can't add an externally purchased font file

- we do seem to have Creative cloud biz accounts / profiles

- we still cannot activate the font in any way within the CC biz

and the only resolution suggested thus far is to pay more money to adobe for something that we've happily used for the last 2-3 years without a hitch, but now due to an upgrade your side it no longer works ....
yet we are still paying

so think we need a proper solution or workaround that doesn't cost us extra money really

as I've already spent the £100-odd on the font to no avail

and I have bought a personal acrobat DC pro licence, so that at least someone in the biz can use the font, but it is unworkable .... so that's an extra £180 I've spent, when I already have a acrobat pro Dc biz licence

and it is not workable or practical for me to do the work for 11 people as I am the only one who can access the font due to my personal purchase!

thanks

Jon

[defaultngzyhs43i3hv]

I hear your pain, Jon - and I'm glad I'm not alone in this - it's been a tough couple of weeks trying to work around this issue.

And thanks for that explanation, Vikrant. But that doesn't make sense to me.
When I log into our Management Console to look at plans for my business, the Acrobat DC Pro offering clearly shows that Fonts are included as per the screenshot below. And for the last couple of years, my staff have been able to use the fonts via their subscriptions to Acrobat DC Pro.
My understanding of what's happened is that Adobe has now split users' accounts so that when they're using their 'Business' account they can't access fonts. Our staff create documents in MS Office then use the Acrobat Pro software to create PDFs. The fonts won't work in their MS Office software as they have to sign into their Business profiles to create the PDFs. Then if they sign into their Personal profile to access the fonts, they can't create any PDFs!
And if fonts have now been effectively detached from the Acrobat DC Pro 'Business' profile offering, why weren't subscribers warned about this and given a financially viable alternative?
For three years we've been using the Acrobat Pro DC licence with fonts and now we suddenly can't - we have lost hours and hours in productivity over the last month due to this change (trying to work out what was happening) and due to the lack of explanation and warning from Adobe.
I realise this isn't your fault Vikrant - and it's great to finally have someone from Adobe address this issue on the forum - but I believe that businesses like ours and Jon's are just the tip of the iceberg here.
What I can’t understand is Adobe’s thinking with this change. What use are fonts on a Personal profile if a business has signed someone up to Acrobat DC Pro? Surely Adobe must realise that we’d want our staff to be able to access fonts as part of their work tasks they way they’ve been able to in the past?

[Vikrant R · Accepted solution]

Thanks for bearing with us as we worked through this issue. Our teams were able to reproduce and then fix it. DC only users should now be able to sync fonts on their desktop machines. Users can sign in to the CC Desktop app with their business profiles and then jump over to fonts.adobe.com to activate the desired fonts. The Adobe Fonts website will also prompt DC-only users to select their business profiles while signing in. With this fix in place, you won't need to switch between the personal and business profiles to access both Fonts and Acrobat.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused and really want to thank you for the detailed steps and screenshots which helped our teams isolate and fix the issue.

[defaultngzyhs43i3hv]

Thank you, Vikrant! You've made our day - and our week - with that news! 

Our staff have tested it this morning and can access fonts via their DC Pro accounts - it's working again the way it was six weeks ago. We are sooooo relieved - really appreciate you hanging in there with us and getting it resolved.

Have a great week yourself !