I’ve collected a good number of fonts over the years, but recently, when I went looking for a font for a particular purpose, I noticed that a sizable number wouldn’t install under Vista, the installation process responding with a message indicating that the font was corrupted.

My first thought was VIRUS! But after checking a number of files, they all appears more or less like TTF files that would install.

It was highly unlikely that this number of fonts just “became” corrupted, so I started researching the problem.

Come to find out, true type font files contain a number of descriptive fields such as the name, family of the font, style and so on.

Under Windows 95, Win2K and even earlier Windows XP, these extra fields were essentially ignored.

BUT, under Windows Vista (and, apparently Windows XP SP2), these fields MUST BE FILLED or Windows will indicate that the font is corrupt.

So the question became, “How the heck do I fill in those fields?”

Font Creator to the rescue.

This is a nifty little program that allows you to edit TTF files, glyphs and all. Now, I’m no professional typographer, but I’d played with Font Creator several times in the past to cobble together special purpose fonts for one reason or another.

I downloaded the newest 5.6 eval version, installed and tried loading a font. Sure enough Font Creator could load all these “corrupted” fonts just fine.

So I started poking around until I came across the Tools/AutoNaming menu option.

Select it, let it suggestion names for all the various font descriptive fields, and the save the font.

Bam! The font is fixed and installed just like it’s supposed to.

Very cool.