I recently found that some of my apps are displaying unprintable or foreign (a-z) characters on my Win98SE system (English, SESP2, IE6 and DX9c), notably my Soundblaster Mixer panel (the gadgets only, menus are fine), UPXShell v3.07, and Kerio Personal Firewall v2.1.5 (only when viewing my logfile via KPF). One font being loaded at the same time as the mixer, ESTRE.TTF (Estrangelo Eddesa), panned out to be a unicode font that apparently has display issues on Win98 system yet deleting it and clearing the cache didn't fix the problem.

It's then I noticed that all non-regular truetype fonts (ie. bold and italic) and many of the bitmap fonts on my system were displaying only numeric characters, and of those bitmap fonts that did show alphabetic characters (using fontview.exe) only the MS Sans Serif family (sserife.fon, sserifee.fon, ssee1257.fon,...) displayed the full range of point sizes; the others showed their 12 point character set only. Thinking it was an issue with the fonts themselves I replaced them with newly extracted 98SE fonts but unfortunately the problem still exists.

I'm ignorant of how Windows systems utilize fonts and I haven't a clue what to try next. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what might be going on or how best to approach a fix?

Thanks in advance.

Though some pix might help (someone else that is - I'm rather sick of looking at them )





Anyone?

Cheers.

How many fonts have you got in your font folder ?

R u using Korean or Chinese version(s) of Sound Blaster software?
If it's a multilanguage version, make sure to select English at install time.
Also make sure your SB software [or some other app(s)] did not replace/add English fonts into %windir%\fonts at install time.

Also, make sure all your fonts in %windir%\fonts are English [or same language as your OS].
D/l + install TTF Extension [free from MS]:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/truetypeproperty21.mspx
and/or other 3rd party tools [like a font viewer/manager, most are free(ware)], and look for Asian character strings inside fonts properties. If u find any, make sure that particular font file also contains English chars, or replace that font with the English version.

Also make sure u don't have too many fonts in %windir%\fonts , if u do, some may not display properly.
If that is the case, delete [backup 1st] some of the fonts u don't use too often.
Then restart Windows.
Notice that some of the fonts [especially the ones used by the UI] may not allow to be deleted from within Windows.
If that is the case, delete them either from native/true MS-DOS mode, or from Safe mode:
http://www.mdgx.com/msdos.htm#MEN
But make sure not to delete the system fonts installed by Windows. Those are listed inside %windir%\INF\FONTS.INF .

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your replies. I'm happy to say the problem looks to be solved - in brief fixed by removing certain fonts as you (MDGx) describe.

I had relatively few fonts installed (something I should've mentioned earlier) and my soundblaster software was installed using a modified inf stripped of references to non-english files so I'd already ruled those issues out (excellent suggestions nonetheless thanks). In fact, by the time I'd read your posts I'd wrongly convinced myself that the system file(s) responsible for the loading of fonts was the primary cause of my woes, and was thinking a reinstall would mess with my head less than trying to hunt down the problem.

Fortunately your efforts sparked me into a rethink, and it dawned on me that the likely reason why (Sysinternals') FileMon wasn't showing the loading of fonts in recent checks (one of the reasons I suspected corrupted/mismatched system files) was because the fonts had already been loaded, so I gave it another go after a reboot (ran FileMon then the mixer) and found that smalle.fon and gautami.ttf were being used by the mixer. Smalle.fon appeared ok but the TTF Extension reported this about gautami.ttf:


Obviously not appropriate for my system so I deleted it, rebooted, then rechecked the mixer, and repeated the process until I hit "Tomaha" which seems to work fine with all of the apps I'd had problems with. (Some of the UPXShell text is being clipped due to the size of the font but that's a minor problem I can certainly live with.)

By the way, something I noted during the process was that the fonts used were in alphabetic order - estre.ttf, gautami.ttf, latha.ttf, mangal.ttf,... which, in conjunction with the TTF extension messages, leads me to suspect that certain types of ttf are designated as user interface fonts and that the first (alphabetically) of such fonts installed is what gets loaded when one is required. Might just be a coincidence though as it doesn't make much sense to handle things that way. I also noticed that when tomaha.ttf loaded smalle.fon no longer did, which might mean something to someone.

Now stuff going to work, I'm off to play NetHack

Again, you're feedback is much appreciated.

Cheers.

You may want to use this one instead of the one you have.