9300M, XP, OTF, and lots of surprises.

[DeathWolf]

Hello all,

Yesterday, I noticed that on my laptop with a 9300M G, otf fonts were erroring when trying to open them, fontview complaining they were damaged.

Very confused about it, I checksum'ed the fonts to those on my main station, and everything matched perfectly.

I checked on a few more stations, and everything worked really fine.

So I started checking if there was a possible dll dependency problem, only to find out after numerous replacements, that nothing was affecting it.

I even started duplicating the main stations registry parts that fontview(window's builtin font viewer) accesses to make sure it was not that.

It became clear after 2 hours of work that the problem was nothing apparent.

I started stopping services, stopping things from auto-running at start, but nothing would do, until I finally disabled the nvidia display driver.

Suddenly(I was back in vga mode) the otf fonts all opened fine. Re-enabled the driver, and bam, everything went to hell again.

Now after some more experimenting, none of the 174.x/175.x driver series I've found here seem to be working with otf.

Only when I went back to 169.28 that the otf font problem worked as well as the display driver. I also tried putting the actually driver files(nv4_mini.sys, nvdisps.dll to be exact)

from later 17x releases in the 169.28 base, which roughly did work(though it broke control panels of course since versions mismatched) but still broke otf display.

This has me thinking that there is something nasty going on, as if nvidia hijacked gdi32 font functions, and that the support had been broken somehow...

I'll be gladly open to any suggestions as this has been quite annoying for me.

(Some bugs in 169.x drivers are annoying)

Thanks,

DeathWolf

[DeathWolf]

After some more experiments, 171.37 do work, 173/174/175 series dont.

So far:

169.28 good

171.37 good

173.68 bad(could not get it to load, it would bsod)

174.16 bad

174.31 bad

174.74 bad

175.63 bad

I'm still open to any suggestion as to what to test/blame/do.

Edited May 6, 2008 by DeathWolf

[hola]

Off-topic: I think the 9300M G is very comparable performance-wise to the 8400M G/GS?

[DeathWolf]

Off-topic: I think the 9300M G is very comparable performance-wise to the 8400M G/GS?

Yeah, as far as I know it's just a 8400 with more ram only sold to asus.

[DeathWolf]

Sorry to bump this back up but, if anyone with XP32 bit, a geforce 8xxx or 9xxx mobile chipset could try opening an otf font and tell me if it works for them, it'd help.

Someone with a 8400/9300/9400 would be particularly helpful. If it works(or not) please tell me what driver&inf you are using.

I've uploaded one of the otf fonts creating problems here:

Some otf font

[astrial]

no problem for me, currently on Vista x64 Forceware 175.12

[DeathWolf]

In an amusing turn of event, I found out the problem is a conflict between nvidia drivers and the asus screen drivers. Which was fairly unexpected.

Guess that solves the issue though.

[Guest opentype conflict]

I have th same problem. Can you tell me how did you solve it?

[Guest Daveed F]

Same here- Post Script fonts and Open Type Fonts are not recognized by the system. Asus motheboard and Nvidia 8500 card.

Can't seem to find any solution.

Would really appreciate a suggestion.

[Guest MaKe]

Good news. Nvidia has identified the problem and provided a fix. The way it was explained to me, Windows expects the device driver to be a certain size (maximum). In this case, the nvidia driver is slightly larger than expected. A simply registry entry will resolve the issue in WinXP (the issue doesn't occur in Vista).

To resolve the problem, do the following:

Open the registry editor (regedit)

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Add a new REG_DWORD entry called SessionImageSize with a value (decimal) of 20

Reboot

The Type 1 fonts should now open/install without any problems.

Greets

[Guest RAGEous]

Good news. Nvidia has identified the problem and provided a fix. The way it was explained to me, Windows expects the device driver to be a certain size (maximum). In this case, the nvidia driver is slightly larger than expected. A simply registry entry will resolve the issue in WinXP (the issue doesn't occur in Vista).

To resolve the problem, do the following:

Open the registry editor (regedit)

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Add a new REG_DWORD entry called SessionImageSize with a value (decimal) of 20

Reboot

The Type 1 fonts should now open/install without any problems.

Greets

I just wanted to thank you for that! I have been banging my head against the wall trying to fix this problem. It's been so hard to find any answers online. I finally figured out it was related to the nvidia drivers, but I had no way to fix it. I was simply using ancient drivers so I could still make use of otf fonts. This simple reg key addition solved the problem!

Thanks again...you RULE! :)

BTW, I'm using an 8800GT with the latest release forceware drivers, version 180.48.

-RAGEous

[Guest lost_in_la_fontmancha]

Good news. Nvidia has identified the problem and provided a fix. The way it was explained to me, Windows expects the device driver to be a certain size (maximum). In this case, the nvidia driver is slightly larger than expected. A simply registry entry will resolve the issue in WinXP (the issue doesn't occur in Vista).

To resolve the problem, do the following:

Open the registry editor (regedit)

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Add a new REG_DWORD entry called SessionImageSize with a value (decimal) of 20

Reboot

The Type 1 fonts should now open/install without any problems.

Greets

TYVM! I was very pleased to find an answer to such an obscure question so quickly. I have a Vostro 1510 with an Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS and simmply could not load some custom fonts for a project. After following these simple steps I am all set. Tks again!