Multi-Font Problem

[michaelward]

I seem to have a problem in CorelXara 2.0's Font Gallery. I am running Win2k and I seem to get multiple entries for standard system fonts such as Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman among others. This only occurs in the Font Gallery and nowhere else. This make life difficult when using the font manager as I have 20+ entries (est) for each of these fonts (including variations such as italic).

This is not a life threatening problem but it would be nice if anyone could alert me to the root of the problem and possibly how to sort it out...

Tnakyou very much

M Ward

[michaelward]

I seem to have a problem in CorelXara 2.0's Font Gallery. I am running Win2k and I seem to get multiple entries for standard system fonts such as Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman among others. This only occurs in the Font Gallery and nowhere else. This make life difficult when using the font manager as I have 20+ entries (est) for each of these fonts (including variations such as italic).

This is not a life threatening problem but it would be nice if anyone could alert me to the root of the problem and possibly how to sort it out...

Tnakyou very much

M Ward

[Sean Sedwards]

This could be caused by an upgrade or a re-installation of Windows. Although it's not possible for a user to install more than one font with the same name, it is possible by working directly with the registry. I added some duplicate entries but was unable to get Xara to see more than one copy, however there may be other factors and I'm not using Win 2000. Your first course of action should be to check the Fonts directory for any duplicate entries.

Regards - Sean

[This message was edited by Sean Sedwards on August 22, 2000 at 02:00 AM.]

[justin_flude]

... is W2000 breaking CX2. W2000 has a new kind of TT font that organises entire families under one font name. Unfortunately when non W2000-aware software tries to enumerate this new type, it gets every single font variation back from the system as a proper font in its own right. Apart from that, though, it's harmless. The fonts work OK but there's just a lot of them.

It's fixed in Xara X. In fact I sorted it myself [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Sean Sedwards]

'M' appears to have installed Win2K over a previous version of Windows and his Fonts directory now contains the old separate font files plus the new all-in-one fonts. Although the problem is harmless, the solution would seem to be to delete the old font files, as I previously suggested.

Regards - Sean

[michaelward]

Sorry Sean, but this is a fresh install copy of Win2k, so that's not the prob... :-) however I think Justin may have been right with his diagnosis.

I had been (slowly) coming to that conclusion myself. If you notice in Win2k Character Map, there are many variants of the same fonts (the new style "Open Type" fonts, which I believe are a cross between the TrueType standard and the Postscript standard fonts). This raised my suspicions, as it seemed that only the OpenType fonts were diplaying this problem...

Like I said in my original post, this is only an annoyance... so is there any way to fix it in Xara 2 (although i will be upgrading to Xara X)

If anyone can rid me of this annoyance then I would be grateful, if not then I suppose I must wait for Xara X...

Thanx [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

M Ward

[justin_flude]

If there's a fix for this in pre-Xara X releases, then Xara don't know about it. I've suggested that it's W2000 breaking CX2, but to be fair to all concerned, it could be that CX2 doesn't set to zero some "reserved" fields in the structures it uses to interrogate Windows about fonts. Those fields are no longer reserved in W2000 and actually do something nowadays - something which old CX2 isn't designed to work with.

Just to reiterate - the bug is harmless, affecting only the display of fonts in the font gallery, and it _is_ fixed in Xara X.

[Sean Sedwards]

OpenType fonts can contain Type 1 data, TrueType data, or both for cross-platform compatibility. The fonts supplied with Win 2K seem to have both, which is why Xara is seeing double. The Type 1 data is a duplicate of the TrueType data and is only included to accord with Microsoft's Open Type initiative. Unless you have some apps. dependent on Type 1 fonts, the temporary solution appears to be to uninstall the new OpenType fonts and replace them with the ordinary TrueType versions.

Regards - Sean

[michaelward]

This problem is relatively harmless. However, if my problems were limited to just two copy of each font it would be fine... here are details of my just my Arial font...

25 (count em) copies of Arial
25 copies of Arial Bold (not Arial Black, but he bold version you get by pressing the Bold button)
25 copies of Arial Bold Italic... AND
25 copies of Arial Italic

Now repeat this problem for Courier New and Times New Roman... this make 288 redundant entries

This is what makes it a bit of a chore to use the Font Gallery. This problem is not evident in the ordinary Font List that you get when using the Text tool...

Replacing the OpenType fonts with the TrueType version might work... but I don't fancy trying on the off chance it might break my Win2k installation... You know, the more I look at this problem and the more strange it seems [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

M Ward

[This message was edited by M Ward on August 25, 2000 at 08:11 PM.]

[This message was edited by M Ward on August 25, 2000 at 08:12 PM.]

[This message was edited by M Ward on August 27, 2000 at 08:42 PM.]

[gerryiles]

There are 25 duplicates for each font because the problem is related to filtering the list of fonts returned as it contains each font in each character set. Something has changed with the introduction of OpenType that causes some old programs to fail to detect the duplicates and hence report the font once for each character set (Win2k has 25 character sets).

Gerry