UPDATE…
You can read this entire page…..BUT…. Recently I found a file, on the Microsoft site, which will restore Arial fonts on Windows XP when they’ve been buggered. It’s a much easier approach than what I’d originally written on this page. Simple run a small, executable file (which you can download, below) and you can skip my original directions – Arial fonts are fixed!
DOWNLOAD ARIAL32.exe
Old instructions….
Okay – this was a pain in the ass. So you’ve installed a bunch of fonts and you’ve managed to overwrite one or more of your stock XP fonts, and, things look like hell. Basically, this is what I did that worked for fixing things….when I’d done what I’ve just described!
- Put your XP disc in the optical drive (in this example, drive “D”)
- From a command prompt type: D: (do not type “cd”, as you’re changing drives, not directories….)
- If you wanna go insane, you can NOW type about 65 lines that like this (optionally, check out list item 5):
expand D:\i386\arial.tt_ C:\arial.ttf
The above will copy arial.ttf to C:\arial.ttf – make a folder and change the path if you want to save fonts, well, in a folder somewhere else (uhm…obviously).
- Copy the extracted font(s) to C:\Windows\fonts. In my case, I kept getting a pop-up deal that said I had to, first, uninstall the existing font (before I could copy) – but, then, it seemed to copy anyway. Who knows….? In desperation you could mount the drive with Slax in read/write mode (as I recall, something like this: mount -t ntfs-3g -o force /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1) and copy and paste, baby. Maybe it’s the long way around, but it would work.
- Okay – this could be a huge pain in the ass if you’ve got a bunch of fonts screwed up. I wrote a batch file that worked fine to extract these things and it could be edited to a different extraction path…Sample Batch File
And to make it insanely simple, here are all of the stock fonts from an XP disc:
And, if you don’t know which font is screwed up here’s a list of all of the stock XP fonts – if you’re feeling industrious, add these to the batch file and just get ’em all. I was too tired, tonight:
