The font which was not there

February 26, 2009 8:44 AM

On Windows (XP/Vista), how does Microsoft Office look up the list of fonts which are available to the user?

I ask because there is one font in the list which I cannot locate. I know the filename and its location. I can see the filehandle in process explorer so I know this file is being loaded for the font, there is no doubt. However, this file is not in the standard Windows Fonts folder (c:\Windows\Fonts), is not visible in the control panel applet, and is not referred to anywhere in the registry. How does Word know how to find this font?

Alternatively, is there some way of preventing Word from making a specific font available to the user, without removing said font from the system?

posted by splice to computers & internet (17 comments total)

This is a guess but under the users local settings/applications is there an entry for Office and then a directory for fonts?

I dont have a windows machines here right now to test but im sure you could do a quick check
posted by moochoo at 9:36 AM on February 26

1. I don't believe there is such a directory

2. Process Explorer and the view of the network share absolutely confirms this: the font is being opened from a network location. Therefore it is not on the local drive.
posted by splice at 9:50 AM on February 26

This site says

To add fonts from a network drive without using disk space on your computer, make sure that the Copy fonts to Fonts folder check box, in the Add Fonts dialog box, is clear.

but it doesn't say how to remove them. I always thought that not using the copy option resulted in moving the file, but I normally just drag the font into C:\windows\fonts by hand anyway. Regardless, I can't find anything about removing network fonts - everything just says go to %windir%/fonts and delete the ones you want to remove. I'm guessing you've restarted?
posted by niles at 10:01 AM on February 26

Restarting unloads the font from memory but does not remove it from the font lists in Microsoft Office.

This is an issue because the font is located on a network share which only allows a limited number of users based on the number of concurrent licences we have for a piece of software. People are locking up this resource simply by being in Word, because of the font. We need to either remove the font and install it locally instead, or block any application except the appropriate one from loading it.
posted by splice at 10:34 AM on February 26

Font list is in the registry. There's no ini file or file dump. More on font linking here.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:45 AM on February 26

Thanks for the effort damn dirty ape. Unfortunately the font is not present in that location, or indeed, anywhere in the registry. The font name is "Le Robert" and the filename is lerobert.ttf, and neither of these appear anywhere in the registry or local drive. It's the damnedest thing and I can't even being to understand it.
posted by splice at 11:02 AM on February 26

It looks like damn dirty ape linked to the Windows CE registry location. What do you have listed in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts]? Looking through my list, there is a small chance that the font name will be a variation on "Le Robert".
posted by niles at 11:23 AM on February 26

No, it's not there.
posted by splice at 12:11 PM on February 26

Try regmon and see what it reports when you startup word or try to use that font. Filemon might reveal a location too.

Alternatively, is there some way of preventing Word from making a specific font available to the user, without removing said font from the system?

You can also remove permissions from opening the network share it is on.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:27 PM on February 26

Removing permissions from the share would be counter-productive. The font needs to be used by the software it is attached to, and we cannot block access to that software.

My next step will be to regmon and filemon the initial installation to see what may be happening. Hopefully this will give me more details.
posted by splice at 12:37 PM on February 26

Honestly, if this is the DRM scheme that came with the font, I'd call support and tell them that word is doing this. This has to be a common scenario with them.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:41 PM on February 26

cripes. Would moving the font to a slightly different location (i.e., inside one additional folder) be a viable option?
posted by niles at 12:44 PM on February 26

damn dirty ape, it has nothing to do with DRM. It has to do with software for which we have bought concurrent use licenses but which does no checking on its own. We are forced to control access through network share capacity restrictions. Unfortunately this is failing because of a font which is installed on client machines.

niles, that is an option, but to first move it to a local machine, we would have to remove the network version so that it stops referring to it. In this case we cannot find any way to do that.
posted by splice at 1:10 PM on February 26

I might be misunderstanding you, but my thinking was that if the font is suddenly in a different location, Office will not be able to find the file and will no longer show it. Not sure if that would do the trick, but I've had to do similar things to remove associations with networked files.
posted by niles at 1:16 PM on February 26

It's an option... Perhaps it could work. To test I would need to remove the font which means getting everyone off the share and the software first. Since we manage nearly 1000 clients this is not necessarily easy during business hours. But I will keep that in mind, there may be something there.
posted by splice at 1:46 PM on February 26

I didn't see the time go apparently and it is after hours now. I removed the font from the share temporarily and installed it locally. I verified with Word that it was loading locally. I started the application and it loaded it from the local drive as well. Beautiful.

Now we just have to figure out a way to deploy this solution to the clients. Probably we will add something to the logon script to copy/install the font locally and that should do it. Thanks.
posted by splice at 2:01 PM on February 26

Great. That was weird....glad you were able to get it out of the system!
posted by niles at 5:41 PM on February 26