Fonts and font faces (Calibri Bold)

English
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#1

We are in the process of switching from MS Office to LibreOffice. My current test bed is a clean Win11 install with Office 2024 LTSC and LibreOffice 25.2.5 with a selection of documents to test and compare in both.

Some of our files contain a font, “Calibri Bold”, that is initially unavailable in both office suites but magically appears in MS Office when opening a file that uses that font. (All online communication for MS Office has been disabled, so I assume the font wasn’t downloaded. Also all the required font files were available on the system).

When inspecting the font files, I noticed that the font name is always “Calibri” which only provides different font faces (bold, italic, …). Windows registry, however, contains a list of the different fonts:

2025-08-05_-_Calibri_Bold_Registry
2025-08-05_-_Calibri_Bold_Registry692×304 67.6 KB

MS Office provides the font in the font selection dialog when working with a document that contains “Calibri Bold” (without such a document, there is no “Calibri Bold” in the selection dialog):
(as I am a new user, I can only include one media file in my post, sorry. There was a screenshot of MS Office’s font selection dialog showing “Calibri”, “Calibri Bold” and “Calibri Light”)

Whereas LibreOffice does not offer that font and always shows the font name in italic. Moreover, the font replacement table does not offer any possibility to add a font face to the substitution, like:
“Calibri Bold” is “Calibri” with bold face.

I am pretty clueless on how to address this. We do have tons of documents containing “Calibri Bold” (up to now I have no idea whether other fonts are affected by this as well). I sincerely hope for help here!

Thanks and all the best,
Adi

#2

Why? Who would produce that? Sigh.
Well, file a bug report.

#3

I thought about this as well… The best explanation I could come up with is that around the time of Office 2007, when Calibri was introduced, some of those font faces existed as font names (like “Calibri Bold”). In our special case, some Mac users might have been involved in this as well and might even have provided “document designs”. (Unfortunately I do not have access to winxp/office 2007 installers or very old macos with corresponding office in order to be able to verify this theory)

As time moved forward, people used documents as templates by removing the content while retaining font settings and the like. The usual poor people’s templating system… :wink:

Thank you very much, I will do that. Just one more question: what is it that I should ask for?

There are several things that come to my mind:

  • include type face in font substitution (“Calibri Bold” maps to “Calibri” with bold)
  • provide (hardcoded) mapping of some ms core fonts to work around certain oddities (detect “Bold” at the end of a font name, strip it off and just make the text bold)
  • some other special feature to automatically match font name and style based on a given font name

Which would be the preferable feature?

#4

You provide a sample file, and two screenshots, where MS Office renders it correctly, and LO doesn’t. Include there in the document both a text in Calibri, and a text in Calibri Bold. That’s all. The request is: LibreOffice must render it as the reference application does.

#5

If it helps in any way:
I installed LibreOffice on a new laptop running Windows 11.

Calibri

On the left is the selection in LibreOffice and on the right is the Fonts-Calibri folder.
Of course, bold and italics are possible e.g. in Writer.

Version: 25.8.0.2 (X86_64)
Build ID: 80a8bc2ef75d415a197e282da0ebf917315d5e24
CPU threads: 16; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (build 26100); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI: de-DE
Calc: threaded

#6

I just want to warn you against a common pitfall. Every change of tool requires a change of procedure. Every case I experienced in my professional life where “switch the tool and continue with your workflow as if nothing happened” failed lamentably.

Here your motivation seems to be to stop paying M$ fees. Don’t expect to produce “perfect” DOCX documents; Writer is not Word (same for Impress and PowerPoint). There is some compatibility but not exact substitution.

Of course, if the majority of your users creates quick’n’dirty “simple” documents based on direct formatting, there will be no problem.

However you express the need to check some existing documents will be unaffected by the change. This suggests these document might be quite complex. This is where compatibility becomes problematic.

IMHO, you can’t avoid educating your users to the new suite and switching to ODF-native documents.

While at it, LO provides a very sophisticated template feature, much better and safer than loading an existing document and wiping its contents. This is also an area into which educate your users (and document designers).

#7

It seems the sample can be created easily in either Word or Writer by selecting the text, setting the font to Calibri, typing Bold into the font name and pressing Enter.

  • In Writer, it keeps the font name as entered but puts the font name in italics and leaves the text untouched
  • In Word, it keeps the font name as entered and bolds the text

I suppose the documents were created from a template set up by doing that.

#8

Thank you all for your valuable remarks and insights. I am currently waiting for the link to register my bugzilla account in order to be able to submit a bug report.

While waiting I did some more tests and found a workaround for my problem that will help me move forward.

I tested several of the older Microsoft fonts for that issue but found that only Calibri shows this behaviour. For all the other fonts, MS Office told me that the font is unavailable. But for Calibri the following derivatives seem to have existed:

  • Calibri Bold
  • Calibri Italic and
  • Calibri Bold Italic

When entering these names in MS Office’s font selection, they will just be made available by using the bold and/or italic font face of Calibri. Otherwise the fonts are only present when working on a document that already used one of these fonts.

The origin of the document in question seem to have been a mac user (as already speculated above). So for some reason there seem to have been these fonts available on Macs and MS is providing a shim for gracefully handling documents containing these.

Regarding the workaround, I took ‘calibrib.ttf’ – Calibri with bold font face – copied it to a new file name, used this python script and renamed the font family to “Calibri Bold”. Then installed that font and everything worked out just fine. LibreOffice is doing a great job at document compatibility! <3

The only disadvantage of this approach is that users now get “Calibri Bold” offered at the fonts selection in any case. For the time being this is ok with me as we do have plenty of documents with that font anyways.

Some of you shared some insights about how to properly do a migration to LibreOffice and hinted at Templates. I will get back to that once we validated that our existing documents can still be used and render somehow similar to before. I was already thinking a little about how to properly introduce LibreOffice.

Thank you all, again, for your help and all the best,
Adi

#9

This may also be helpful:

My Migration from MS-Office to LibreOffice

1 Like
#10

Here is the link to the bug report:

tdf#167835

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