Issues using custom fonts in Visual Studio 2008 under Server 2003

Question

I am having an issue with a custom font that my company has created. When I set the Font property of a control in Visual Studio 2008 to our font, I receive the following error:

Only TrueType fonts are supported. This is not a TrueType font.

The font selection dialog shows our font, and double-clicking the font in the Windows font folder correctly shows a preview.

I have done a little testing with the other developers that I work with. Apparently this issue only pops up when running VS2008 under Server 2003, but the design time font works fine under Vista and XP. Other system fonts such as Arial and Courier New work fine, just not our in-house custom font.

Does anyone know why Server 2003 would have an issue with a font that is supposedly TrueType?

Update:

I was looking into additional differences between the machines. The PC in question did not have Microsoft Office installed. After installing Office, the font in question worked in Visual Studio without any other modification.

As an addendum to the original question, why would the installation of Microsoft Office cause a font to start working?

Answer 1

You really need to tell more about your custom font. It sounds like it could be an OpenType font that Server 2003 wouldn't know how to handle, while XP and Vista do. OpenType fonts on Windows usually have the extension .ttf, so you could mistake it for a TrueType font at first glance, but Windows font viewer should display it with the green and black 'O' logo, at least on XP and Vista. If you want to really know what's in the font, use a font editor; for example FontForge which is great and free (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/), or FontLab Studio's demo version (http://www.fontlab.ch/).

As for why installing Office solved the problem, my guess would be that it added some DLL that deals with OpenType fonts, but again, it's really difficult to tell without knowing more about the font.

Answer 2

I have a similar but different problem. In the field we will have XP but no MS Office and probably no "East Asian" font pack installed (a separate search didn't tell me exactly what is in that option). Our goal is to be able to display Asian characters, so I was looking for a solution. I thought I would try a free Unicode font, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Unifont

So I was lead here because I was creating a Windows Form app using VS2008 (using my Dev box that XP, as well as Office). It is a TTF extension and in the font folder appears fine, as well as working in WordPad.

In the VS Designer, I select the Unifont for my TextBox control but VS gives that error message about it not being TrueType. So when is a TrueType font not TrueType?