The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Aptos vs Times New Roman
Microsoft's two default fonts, decades apart. Times New Roman is the transitional serif Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent drew for The Times in 1932, while Aptos is Steve Matteson's neo-grotesque sans that replaced Calibri as the Office default in 2023 — one built for narrow newspaper columns, the other for neutral screen documents.
Aptos is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Inter, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Aptos → Times New Roman is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Tinos, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Times New Roman →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Times New Roman is a high-contrast serif based on Plantin, with a tall x-height, short descenders and a condensed footprint that packs words into newspaper columns.
- Aptos is a low-contrast grotesque drawn against Helvetica and Arial, with flat horizontal and vertical stroke endings, a double-story g and a tailed l that keeps it distinct from capital I.
- Aptos ships in six weights from Light to Black with redrawn oblique italics, plus Display, Narrow, Mono, Serif and Slab companions; Times New Roman's core family is the classic four styles.
- Both are proprietary: Times New Roman is bundled with Windows and macOS but sold separately by Monotype, while Aptos is tied to a Microsoft 365 subscription and not licensed for free standalone use.
- Times New Roman has free metric-compatible stand-ins (Liberation Serif, Tinos), so swapping it out costs nothing; Aptos has no drop-in equivalent.
Aptos
Reach for Aptos when you want a plain, contemporary sans for Office documents, slides and email that reads as neutral rather than dated — and you already pay for Microsoft 365.
Times New Roman
Reach for Times New Roman for formal, dense running text — legal filings, academic papers, anything that expects a conventional serif — where its compactness and universal availability still do the job.