Why does a font on my computer show up under one user account but not another?

Question

I have a font called Pump LET Plain Demi Bold installed on my Windows 7 computer and it shows up and can be used when logged in an account that is part of the administrator group but not as an account that is just a standard user.

Why is that? I thought fonts were a system wide resource.

The Fonts screen in Control Panel says the font is stored in C:\Windows\Fonts\70214___.TTF.

When logged in as the administrator user I can see that the font file has Full control permissions for SYSTEM and <Computer name>\Administrators and Read and Read & execute permissions for <Computer name>\Users.

When logged in as the standard user account, I can open a command prompt and successfully execute a dir C:\Windows\Fonts\70214___.TTF. It shows the file details as expected. When I paste the file path into the address bar of Windows Explorer a dialog pops up saying Windows cannot find 'C:\Windows\Fonts\70214___.TTF'. Check the spelling and try again.

Answer 1

Maybe there is a problem with the permissions on that file. Right-click the file in Explorer and check the tab Security.

Answer 2

Windows can hide certain fonts based on your language settings. So basically if the font is not designed for your selected settings it will also not be displayed. In your situation it might be the case that the language settings differ between accounts. You can check or uncheck this option in the font settings which can be found in the configuration panel.

You can also hide/unhide individual fonts in the list of fonts in the configuration panel. Check there if that particular font is hidden and if so "show" it back.