Windows – How to prevent fonts installed by me from disappearing on windows reboot

fontsrebootwindows xp

This is similar to this question in SF, except that this is happenning on my laptop where my user id is part of the administrators group.

The fonts that I install disappear after a reboot. I need these fonts really badly for 2 reasons: 1. Certain fixed-width fonts I'm too used to for programming/IDE/Emacs. 2. Special fonts for viewing content in indian languages.

Any ideas on how I can prevent this from happenning ?

Scenario:

Boot-up & login into windows using my user id.
Install a new font (Goto C:\WINDOWS\Fonts, click File -> Install new font..., point to location, select Copy files to fonts folder, click OK)
New font is installed. It is visible in all applications e.g., in Microsoft Word and GNU Emacs.
Restart the computer and login into same user id.
The new fonts installed in step 2 are gone ! They are not accessible in any application.

I checked the following:

I am using windows XP.
My userid is part of Administrators group
In terms of windows permissions (security tab in folder properties) Administrators group has full control over the C:\Windows\Fonts folder
Even after reboot the font files are present in C:\Windows\Fonts folder and I cannot reinstall them. When I try to reinstall I get an error dialog
Only the new fonts I have installed are missing.
The registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts shows these fonts mapped to the corresponding font files.
In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\win.ini the value Fonts is mapped to data SYS:Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts (it was #SYS:Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts by default).

Best Answer

I found this on a site and this worked for me.

If font files are encrypted (green colored) they become locked and not available after reboot. right click your font (in its folder before you install it), click "properties," "Advanced," and uncheck "Encrypt contents to secure data.

Then install the font.

Related Solutions

Windows – Help transferring Mac OS X fonts to Windows

For some Mac fonts, the font information is stored entirely in the resource fork of the file. On Mac OS X, such fonts look like normal files in Finder, but from tools like ls (and anything else that uses the POSIX layer) these look like zero byte files.

The __MACOSX/._* files from the Zip file are AppleDouble encoded versions of the combination of the resource fork and some extra Finder information from the original files. AppleDouble files are used by Mac OS X when storing files that have a resource fork or Finder info on filesystems that do not support resource forks and Finder info (here Zip is considered a filesystem).

I am not a Windows user and my searches did not turn on any pre-made tools for this. I did find a set of tools that might work. It would be best to run them on a Mac, but they might work on Windows, too.

If you have access to a Mac

extract your Zip archive on that Mac (double-click it, do not use the command-line unzip) and
use a tool like Fondu to extract the TTF (or whatever) from the resource fork
- (I just found the fondu, I have never used it before; caveat emptor)

If you do not have access to a Mac, you may still be able to use fondu, but you will need to compile fondu yourself (it looks like it is possible to build it on Linux, so you might also be able to build it in (e.g.) Cygwin). The next problem is that fondu does not seem able to read AppleDouble files, so you will have to find something that can extract the bare resource fork from the AppleDouble encoded ._*file. I am not sure which Windows-specific tools might be able to decode AppleDouble, but the Mac::AppleSingleDouble Perl module can do it:

perl -MMac::AppleSingleDouble -e 'for(@ARGV) {
    $a = new Mac::AppleSingleDouble($_);
    if(open $f, ">", $_.".rsrc") {
        binmode $f;
        print $f $a->get_entry(2);
        close $f;
    }
}'__MACOSX/._Webdings
# now I have a __MACOSX/._Webdings.rsrc file from which fondu can extract Webdings.ttf

If you are familiar with building Unix-oid tools, building fondu should be easy. For the Perl bit, you should be able to use the cpan tool that comes with most installations of Perl (or, if you are familiar with the layout and installation of Perl modules, just download the AppleSingleDouble.pm file and put it in an appropriate place).

Windows 7 – How to Back Up All Custom Fonts

All your fonts should be stored in the C:/WINDOWS/FONTS/ directory (and all its sub-directories). I suggest you back up all of that, and then preview your backup copy to be sure that all your fonts were actually copied.

Do note that it's possible for fonts to be stored elsewhere, but this is extremely rare. If you do find that something is missing from that FONTS directory, then please post and update back here.

Copying the fonts back into the C:/WINDOWS/FONTS/ folder doesn't always work properly. But, what you can do is select a number of fonts, right-click on them, and then choose the appropriate "Install font" option to get them installed. You should also be presented with an option to copy the files to the FONTS folder (I recommend you do this so that your FONTS directory will contain copies of all your fonts).

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