Installed font shows differently in Windows 11 and Office 365

Excellent point! Yes, and some font creators don't respect the bounding box or they fail to maintain the proper height ratios for the glyphs. This results in characters from the font to be too small or too large compared to fonts created from respected foundries. Here's an example:

This is a common problem in Office with free fonts. I don't have issues with fonts from major foundries, so it's clearly possible to produce fonts that don't have such issues. Here's my post on this subject that I wrote 10 years ago! Cross-platform Fonts from Small Foundries: Beware! - Best Practices

As Henry mentioned, this could be caused by something related to that font. Since this problem is only happening to you, there must be something different in your environment compared the the other users.

Go to c:/Winows/Fonts and look at the Rubik fonts installed on your machine, and compare them to those that are installed on another machine that does not have the problem. See if there are the same number of Rubik fonts. You may see only one Rubik font (e.g., Regular), or you may see several for bold italic, etc.

When you have only Regular, Word attempts to create the bold and italic on its own. Otherwise, it will use the bold or italic font that is installed. If you have only the Regular font, then install the bold italic fonts and see what happens. If you already have the bold and italic fonts, Try removing all of them except the Regular font. Be sure to save them, or make sure you can reinstall them after performing the test.

Dear Henry-N,

Thanks for the quick response.

The issue appears in Word and Outlook. For some reason, this is not the case in Excel nor PowerPoint however.

I am not aware of a colleague having the same issue. Ctl+Bold just toggles between bold and bolder. Ctl+Spacebar does not do anything in Word (because I set Rubik as default font for our theme, not aptos). In Outlook it just switches the font to Aptos, but when I put Rubik on, it still appears bold.

Here is Word's style for Normal:

It is the right font, yes, but it is bold or black, not the regular one. It clearly shows that I did not set it to bold in the context menu in word.

Regarding updates, yes, Windows is updating all the time without my knowledge. I put the windows version in my OP. Judging from Office updates there has been one on 3 June, but judging from Word's build version I am still on the version of 29 May (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/officeupdates/current-channel). It may be actually since this install, but I do not know how to see when the update happened. I installed Windows Cumulative Update Preview 2025-05 on 03 June, 2025-05 on 14 May. On the driver side some obscure SoftwareComponent updated on 22/05 and I skip security platform updates as I do not think this is relevant.

Dear PhiGrimpe, 

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community. 

Based on your descriptions you said that the Word is showing the wrong font, but the Window is showing the right standard font you needed. May I ask you some questions this will help us address the issue and assist you more effectively 

Does the issue occur in all Office apps or just specific ones? Try on other apps like Excel, PowerPoint,... to see if the issue also appears. 

Did any recent Windows or Office updates occur before the issue started? 

Does any other user with Window 11 have the same issue ? 

Have you checked the formatting styles in Word? The selected style might have bold enabled by default. 

When you turn on formatting like Bold in Word it continues until something turns it off. You should try to turn it off with Ctrl+B or with Ctrl+Spacebar. 

I appreciate your patience and are here to help. Looking forward to your response. 

Best regards   

Henry-N - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist