postscript fonts no longer accessible in MT

[stuku]

i am running MT 2.0 under win XP SP2. i use a mix of true type, open type and PS fonts. today when i opened MT, each PS font showed up as <Font not accessible>. up until now, the PS fonts were viewable in MT. i could install, uninstall, add to groups etc. just fine.

the font files still reside in their folders, and the installed PS fonts are available to my adobe CS2 apps.

can you help? thanks,
stuku

[Erwin Denissen]

Sorry for my late reply.

Is this problem still there? If so, first download and install MainType 2.1.1. If that doesn't solve the problem, then please send me more information about it, e.g. a couple of fonts, the folder location, etc. Thanks.

[stuku]

thanks very much for your reply! i had already downloaded and installed 2.1.1, but still have the problem. i keep all my fonts in "my font groups" folders, organized by category (serif, sans serif, display, etc.).

a little more detail: i also have a laptop running MT and XP SP2. PS fonts are no problem with the laptop. on the laptop, MT can even see the PS fonts on my desktop, over my network.

the key difference between my desktop and laptop is that on the desktop, i installed MS office 2007. i think that's when the PS font problem first occurred. i uninstalled office 2007. i also tried a system restore (before uninstalling office 2007) but windows was unable to perform the restore. and my PS font problem persists.

it looks like this is not a MT problem, but a system problem. even still, i would appreciate any advice you can offer (e.g., registry tweaks, system commands, etc.). i'm a graphic designer and no longer have access to a huge stable of fonts.

thanks very much for whatever help you can offer.

best,
stuku

[Erwin Denissen]

Please send some fonts to me.

Also do you have Adobe Type Manager installed?

[Erwin Denissen]

Hi stuart,

Thanks for your email.

hi, erwin -- this is in reply to your post. attached are several example
fonts that are located in the "my font groups" directory on my desktop pc. i
cannot view or install them on my desktop. however, i can view and install
them on my laptop.

many of my PC PS fonts were created from mac PS fonts using a program called
CrossFont. until i installed office 2007 on my desktop pc, i was able to
make use of these PS fonts. i can still use them on my laptop machine.

yes, i have ATM v 4.1. i installed it on my desktop pc after i began
experiencing the problem. at the time i thought it was a problem with MT,
now i think it may be a system problem (refer to my previous message). when
i try installing a PS font with ATM, i get the message "Cannot activate
font. the font file(s) are invalid."

i greatly appreciate any help you can offer. this problem is way over my
head!

best wishes,
stuart

The fonts are not the problem.

As mentioned in an earlier post, there is a known bug related to ATM and Windows that causes problems as you've described.

One of the two updates that are mentioned here should help:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.ef9db1e

Do let us know your results.

[Dave Crosby]

Perhaps I'm confused, but we seem to have missed a part of your question.

today when i opened MT, each PS font showed up as <Font not accessible>. up until now, the PS fonts were viewable in MT.

So for some reason, MainType is no longer able to recognize the fonts?

That does not sound like a Windows problem to me.
I also have some of my fonts now showing up as "Not Accessible" in MainType, but I usually can open them with Font Creator.

[Erwin Denissen]

I also have some of my fonts now showing up as "Not Accessible" in MainType, but I usually can open them with Font Creator.

Then Windows refuses to load them, so they somehow don't meet the specifications (in other words they are corrupt).

The original poster send me some fonts, and since I'm able to load them, I assume they are not corrupt.

[garybla]

I ran into the same problem when I tried using MainType and found after much ado that it is not a problem with the font or maintype.

Test 1: Can you add the Type 1 font directly to the fonts folder? (If the answer is no, then this is probably your issue: http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.59b61a73)

Well, hopefully you have resolved your problem by now, but if not the above might set you on the right track. Mostly putting this in here for others that run across this post in their type 1 failure adventures.

The short of it is that for several of us the most recent Nvidia drivers (could be true of other video drivers as well) were interfering with Windows ability to read the Type 1 fonts. Which brings us to:

Test 2: Restart in VGA mode and see if you can add the fonts in either MainType or directly to the fonts folder (If the answer is yes, then you need to start spelunking for older drivers, the 3 of us in the post mentioned above found our solution was going back to the most recent drivers from the manufacturer of our computer rather than from Nvidia. Even the "Adobe partner certified drivers" at Nvidia were not working and the issue seems to lie somewhere at the intersection of the video driver and XP SP2 updates to the atmfd.dll and atmlib.dll files which handle type 1 fonts in windows.)

Hope this helps someone...

[Erwin Denissen]

Hi garybla,

Thanks for taking the time to post this valuable information here. I hope it does help others who encounter the same problem, and I also hope nVidia releases a driver that fixes this bug very soon. Have they actually confirmed this bug, I wonder.

[garybla]

I'm hoping Adobe will pursue it since the drivers they certified also don't support Type 1 fonts. There were 3 people in that thread that all solved the problem by going back to the latest driver from their machine vendor. 2 of the 3 cases were Dell mobile chipset implementations, and mine is a HP xw8000 workstation with a Quadro FX2000 card. In each case these are chipset implementations that Nvidia would expect the machine vendor to support, so they probably don't have a lot of interest in pursuing the issue if it doesn't crop up in their own chipset implementations. I'd be curious to see if the problem could be reproduced on an FX card made by nvidia or if there is really something special about the 3rd party implementations.

[Erwin Denissen]

Someone from HP tech support provided a far easier fix.

Background information: Windows expects the device driver to be a certain size (maximum). Some updates of video drivers (some of nVidia and ATI) are slightly larger than expected. A simply registry entry will resolve the issue in WinXP (the issue doesn't occur in Vista).

Solution:

To resolve the problem, do the following:

Open the registry editor (regedit)

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Add a new REG_DWORD entry called SessionImageSize with a value (decimal) of 20

Reboot

This fix solves open/install of Type 1 fonts as well as issues with OpenType fonts.

Do let us know if this fix works for you.

[pentool]

I've JUST upgraded my old nvidia card (7900GT) to a GeForce GTX275, and installed the latest drivers 195.62 dated 11-26-2009 from nvidia's website. I've been using MT for many moons now and never had this problem. Currently running 2.1.1 build 38.

This problem started right after the driver installation. I'm also getting the "Font not accessible" messages for all my opentype fonts.

I've followed the instruction that the HP support guy wrote above, however, I found that in my registry the SessionImageSize entry was already there and contained a bigger value (48) then the 20 recommended in that message. I did try the 20 though, but needless to say it didn't have any result.

I'm frustrated because now I am not able to work on the project I'm supposed to since can't load the required fonts. Not sure if there were any developments in this matter since January, but I will try to install an older driver and see what happens.

WinXP Pro SP3 | 32bit | 4G

[pentool]

Ok, no need for panic. I installed an older driver (the one before the current) and that solved the problem. Not sure if there was a problem maybe during the latest driver installation or is this indeed a bug in the new driver. But gotta work on a project so don't have time to find this out right now. I might install the latest driver again later and see.

[James Simon]

i had that problem before. sometimes, its the Hardware thats the problem. not the software, the OS nor the Adobe program. sometime, heavy fonts tend to be corrupted if the processor of the computer is slow, or even the graphics card can be the problem.
i use PS for different types of work, and all programs and add ons work perfectly if you upgrade your hardware.

--
cheers!
James

[pentool]

For those who still might read this thread, the problem is the 3GB switch in 32bit systems. This also has been confirmed by nVidia tech support in their forum:

"The 3GB switch is unfortunately not leaving enough kernel space for the display driver (Windows XP 32-bit). When the 3GB switch is triggered, that leaves only 1GB of kernel space which must be shared with all of the other devices. When the 3GB switch is removed, it restores additional kernel space. As PC's become more focuses on the GPU, the display driver will be responsible for doing more and therefore the driver space required increase over time. If you need to use more than 2GB of system memory, best to migrate to a 64-bit operating system."

Link to forum thread:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?show ... 3323&st=20