Some of my fonts aren’t working or typing in certain characters?

There are several reasons that may cause this issue, as follows:

Copyright

Fonts can be subject to Copyright by the designer and have limited use if you do not have full rights to that font.

If you are given a file (including ai, eps, pdf) or have a vDoc from another computer which uses a specific font, you may not have the rights to use all the characters/figures (“glyphs”) of that font i.e. only the glyphs that were originally typed in will be available.

In other words, only the glyphs that were used to make up the text can be used on another computer. Any additional glyphs will be typed using your default font (usually Arial).

Solution

In this case, you can ask the provider for the font source file, find a copy of it online or obtain it from somewhere else so you may install it onto your computer.

See: How to Install Fonts

Graphics/Video Card

Some graphics cards have problems displaying (rendering) fonts on-screen for technical reasons.

Solution

If this is the case you may see the glyphs - if you view the document in wireframe. Though this will not always the case, but can quickly help to identify the graphics card as the issue.

If you can see the glyphs in wireframe, then you may need to adjust the graphics card’s settings or replace it with a graphics card that does work.

Display Settings

Windows has several Display Settings where you can adjust the size of text, apply clear type, view and hide fonts etc. If these settings have been adjusted or set to be incompatible with the Software this may cause many problems.

Solution

Set these all to default and restart the computer for any changes to take effect and recheck the fonts in the Software.

Corrupt Files

A font is a separate file installed into Windows and is not part of the main Software i.e. it is completely independent from the main program.

As such, a font can be corrupt i.e. have errors and only partly work, behave unexpectedly or not at all.

Unfortunately, when an unknown font becomes or is corrupt it can cause havoc with Windows and other fonts on your system and there is no easy solution for this problem.

Solution

Create a folder on your desktop (name it Temp) and move all the non-system fonts from Control Panel > Fonts into this folder. Restart the Software and see if the system fonts work correctly.

If they do, then you can move back say 50 fonts from the Temp folder back into Control Panel > Fonts folder. Restart the Software and see if these fonts work correctly. If they do repeat this step until you find the corrupt font.

Limited Glyphs

Some glyphs may not type in because they have not been included in the font i.e. some font designers only include a limited set of glyphs so they were never in the font to begin with.

Solution

Find a similar font with more glyphs.