Typophile

"Invalid" PS fonts

Steve Marston

Fonts that work in WinME with ATM Deluxe 4.1.24 come up as invalid in WinXP.

I've bewen using a Dell laptop for about 8 years now: WinME and ATM Deluxe. I have thousands of fonts,PS, TT, and some OT. Most fonts work out of the box. Over the last decade I have modified fome fonts for any number of reasons: the designer didn't follow naming conventions (grr!); I added kerning tables with Kernus; I altered some glyphs with Font Monger; and converted a very few fonts from one format to another.

I recently got a refurbished Dell Latitude D820 with WinXP Pro SP2, 2GB memory, and a 2.15 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M video card.

Many of the fonts on my old machine, mostly PS, don't want to install, and come up as invalid. Some I tinkered with install fine; some that are the same as the day I got them do not. There's no consistency that I can see between which fonts install and which ones do not.

I Googled, and I found and tried a registry fix: "Oddly enough, the cause of the problem is apparently that the video card driver is larger than expected. Adding the below registry entry and rebooting the computer is reportedly the solution...." I tried that and the fonts appear to install, but, for example (in both Word and WordPerfect), Times Roman is substituted for Baskerville BE.

The fonts still work fine on my old machine. Any ideas on how I can fix the fonts or my machine or whatever so I can use use my PS fonts?

Steve Marston

Is anyone able and willing to help me?

Ben McElroy

Sorry. I have no idea what might be the issue.

CurveDoctor

you need pfm & pfb, drag the pfm to the fonts folder, not the pfb. pfb is copied automatically. drag pfb comes up as invalid. else install atm light.

HVB

Windows XP and subsequent are much less lenient about fonts conforming to standards. This applies to both T1 and TT fonts. In some cases, merely opening the font in a program like Fontlab or converting it to itself in TransType and re-generating (re-saving) it is sufficient. Sometimes the names in the name tables have to be modified, and sometimes the lack of specified codepages or unicode ranges disable the font.

Font Monger is widely known as "Font Mangler". It is known to have been able to do disastrous things to a font. There are good reasons why it doesn't exist any more.

If the video driver problem is at fault, it usually affects ALL PS fonts, not just a selected few.

- hvb

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