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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.

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  • Tried the suggestions in the answers but no luck... Jan 18, 2012 at 10:48
  • Do you actually have a program that cannot use the font? That is not the same as Explorer not being able to show it.
    – kreemoweet
    Dec 28, 2014 at 18:54

6 Answers 6

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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.

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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.

enter image description here

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  • Cool I didn't know about those. I've checked both accounts and the language settings are the same. On the Fonts screen the font doesn't appear so I'm not able to show/hide it. I've updated my question with more info. Jan 15, 2012 at 4:27
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Maybe there is a problem with the permissions on that file. Right-click the file in Explorer and check the tab Security.

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  • I've checked the file and the permissions look fine to me. I've added the permissions details to the question. Jan 15, 2012 at 4:29
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I was having this problem and I just managed to solve it!

I am a user of a network and I am also the administrator of the network, so I could install fonts without help from another person.

I also tried to install a font in my user account, found that it just wouldn't show up in the Windows Fonts folder. It shows up when I log into the administrator account though.

What solved it is I copied the font file from my user account local folder to a thumb drive, and while logged in to the user account, I installed the font from the thumb drive instead of my local folder. It prompted an administrator authentication as usual, but it worked this time!

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  • Thanks for the tip. My downloads folder is at a network location, and copying to a temp location on my C:/ drive prior to right-click >> "Install" saved me!
    – bkwdesign
    Nov 3, 2017 at 16:03
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The Fonts folder can contain shortcuts to font files, as well as fonts themselves (note the arrows on the icons in the screenshot in Edin's answer). If the "missing" font is a shortcut pointing to a file that is not readable all users, then Explorer will likely deliver the error message described when it tries to access the font metadata, and fails.

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I've actually found a simpler solution. If you install the fonts with an admin account all you need do is log on to a standard user account, leave the "hide fonts based on language settings box unticked in the font settings then restart the pc. Hope this works for you.

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Under Windows 10, in addition to the system font path C:\Windows\Fonts, there is the per-user font path C:\Users\{User Name}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts. The fonts installed by each user will appear in the User Fonts directory.

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