One of the challenges with Business Central in the cloud is that you can only print using fonts that Microsoft have pre-installed on their service. In this video, I’ll demonstrate a trick to get around this. Check out the video:
When Business Central moved to the cloud (SaaS), one of the gotchas that hit many users was the loss of ability to print with any font they wanted. Some companies have their own custom fonts, or need to display content using specialized fonts. Microsoft was aware of this problem and purchased fancy barcode fonts, check printing fonts, and other commonly needed typefaces, making sure they were installed on all their servers. This handled the majority of cases, but what happens when you need a font that simply isn’t installed on Microsoft’s servers? Erik shows us a neat trick using Word’s font embedding feature to solve this problem.
The Problem: Custom Fonts on SaaS
On SaaS Business Central, report rendering happens on Microsoft’s servers. If the font you’ve specified in your Word layout isn’t installed on those servers, the system will substitute it with a default font — meaning your carefully designed layout won’t look the way you intended.
This is a real issue for companies that use branded fonts, specialized display fonts, or any typeface outside of the standard set Microsoft has pre-installed on their cloud infrastructure.
The Demo: Setting Up a Custom Font Layout
Erik demonstrates this using the report layouts for sales invoices in a SaaS Business Central environment. Here’s the walkthrough:
- Navigate to the report layouts for sales invoices
- Export a layout
- Open the exported Word document
- Select all the content and change the font to a custom font — in this case, the “IBM 3270” font, which gives everything an old terminal look
- Save the document and upload it back to Business Central as a replacement layout
- Run the report and preview it
The result? The preview clearly does not show the IBM font. The custom font was ignored because it doesn’t exist on Microsoft’s servers. So the demo appears to fail — but there’s a trick.
The Trick: Embedding Fonts in the Word Document
The solution is a simple but well-hidden checkbox in Microsoft Word:
- Open the Word layout document
- Go to File → Options
- Navigate to the Save section
- Look for the area labeled “Preserve fidelity when sharing this document”
- Check the box: “Embed fonts in the file”
Important Settings to Note
When you enable font embedding, you’ll see two additional options:
- “Embed only the characters used in the document” — Do NOT check this option. Since this is a template, more data will be coming into the document after the template is saved. If you only embed the characters currently in the template, the additional characters from your actual data won’t render correctly.
- “Do not embed common system fonts” — You can optionally check this if you believe that the common Windows system fonts you’re using are also available on Microsoft’s servers. Erik recommends unchecking it to be safe.
The Result
After enabling font embedding, saving the Word document again, and re-uploading it to Business Central as a replacement layout:
- Run the report
- Select an invoice
- Preview it
And there it is — SaaS Business Central has rendered the Word report using the IBM 3270 font, a font that does not exist on Microsoft’s servers. The font data is embedded directly in the Word file, so when Microsoft’s servers process the document, they have everything they need to render it correctly.
Erik notes that in his demo the header wasn’t updated — you’d want to make sure you select all content including headers and footers and apply the font everywhere for a thorough implementation.
Important: This Only Works with Word Layouts
This trick only works with Word layouts. RDLC layouts are processed differently and don’t support this font embedding approach.
Summary
A simple checkbox hidden deep in Word’s options — “Preserve fidelity when sharing this document” → “Embed fonts in the file” — is exactly what we need. The concept is straightforward: you’re telling Microsoft, “Here’s our document, please use this when you print, but preserve the fonts we have embedded in it.” It’s an elegant solution to a common SaaS limitation, and it requires zero AL code or server-side configuration.
