Windows Font Viewer problems

[hvn_nbr_2]

I'm using Windows XP. Normally if I have font files listed in a Windows Explorer window, if I double-click a font name, a new window appears that has a sample of the font in various sizes plus a complete alphabet in the font plus some general info about the font. This happens for all types of fonts, True Type, Open Font (name may be wrong), etc.

Today I ran a program called TTF_INST.EXE that's on a an ancient CD with lots of fonts. It's a font installer program. It shows a list of fonts that you can install. I didn't do anything with it. Upon seeing that it didn't seem to offer anything particularly useful, I just closed it.

However, immediately thereafter double-clicking a font name no longer worked (except for .FON type fonts). When I double-clicked a font, nothing at all (at least nothing visible to me) happened.

I thought that that program probably (without my asking and without its telling me) changed the program associations for some types of font files, so I went to the Windows program to associate file types with a program (Control Panel => Folder options => File Types tab). I selected .TTF from the list of file types, clicked "Change" intending to re-associate that file type with Windows Font Viewer. On the list of programs, it said the recommended program was Firefox! Also Windows Font Viewer was not even on the list of available programs.

With help from Google, I found that the Windows Font Viewer program is fontview.exe, which I found on my system in C:/Windows/system32, so I went back to the Folder Options and selected that program to use for .TTF files.

After that, now when I double-click a TTF file, it displays an error message dialog box that says that the file is not a valid font file.

Any ideas what to do next to try to get back the normal behavior?

[ChromeFoundry]

1. Try this...

First, from the Start button, select "Run..."
Type the following: fontview arial.ttf
and hit <Enter>

If that brings up the Font View window, your files are not corrupt.. proceed to the next step.

Next step...
Open Windows Explorer and Check - Folder Options (Explorer > Tools > Folder Options), go to 'File Types' tab, locate TTF. Make sure it is set to "TrueType Font File".
In Advanced Settings, Edit the "Open" action and see what it says under "Application used to perform action"
it should say: C:\WINDOWS\System32\fontview.exe %1

[hvn_nbr_2]

2. Thank you. I had to adapt your instructions slightly but it works now.

First, a side note: Here on DU I got the answer that I needed to solve my problem within about a day, but the answers in places like Yahoo answers that I found by googling were not right and were from people who obviously knew less than I did.

The first step of your instructions (Run... fontview arial.ttf) worked, which both surprised me and gave me hope.

My Windows Explorer (Explorer > Tools > Folder Options) didn't have a "File Types" tab, but I got to the same functionality from Control Panel > File Options. (I presume that's just that we're talking different versions of XP.)

On the "File Types" tab, it said the type was "TTF file" instead of "TrueType font file" and there was no "Advanced" button, but there was a "Restore" button which said it was to restore system defaults. Since I had no "Advanced" button at that point, restoring system defaults seemed like a reasonable idea so I clicked "Restore".

After I clicked "Restore", the "Advanced" button appeared in place of the "Restore" button and the file type said "TrueType font file" correctly. I still had to edit the "open" action since "restore" didn't restore that part. After I did that, it worked correctly. I had to do the same process for PFM files (font metric files for Adobe Postscript fonts) too.

Before I edited the "open" action, the program that it had there was the same program that I had run from a CD that had seemed to cause the problem in the first place. So the mystery seems to be solved. Apparently that program changes your system parameters without asking or even telling you that it's doing so. I just hate it when software installation procedures change your system parameters without asking or even informing you about it, but this program changes them even without installing, just from running the .exe from a CD, so a word of warning: The shareware (I think) program Font Monster (at least the ancient version on the ancient CD I was using) does that.

Two non-critical mysteries remain:
1. In my previous attempts to fix the problem, I had used the "Change" button on that "File Types" tab to change the "Opens with" program to fontview. That had seemed to work because it showed fontview as the program, but it didn't change the open action. That seems really odd to me--what does the "opens with" parameter do if it doesn't change what the computer uses to open the file? (I have previously used that button successfully to change applications used for graphic and various other files so this seems rather mysterious to me.)

2. Where did that error message come from that said the font file was not a valid font file when I double-clicked it. Since I was doing that without the CD in the CD drive where the "open" parameter was trying to go (D:\FontMonster...), I would have expected something like "program not found" instead "not a valid font file" from Windows.