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Topic: Linking fonts in order to use rating stars (Read 3905 times) previous topic - next topic
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Linking fonts in order to use rating stars

Font linking allows you to rig it so that if a font you wish to use in your layout lacks a glyph, character, etc you can have it fall back to using one from a different font.  This is important to Foobar2000 use in that you can set it up so your machine shows the stars from Arial Unicode MS when you are using a font that lacks those stars. 

I dug around and was unsuccessful in locating a how-to that was more than a hyperlink to the East Asian font support installation page, and that page is not the end-all-be-all of clarity regarding the fact that you can't just install it and have things work.

Anyway, for those of us who are interested in using a font that lacks rating stars,  but still wanting/needing to have the rating stars from Arial unicode MS, here's how you go about getting it working!

(on windows XP anyway)

First, as spoken of above, install the East Asian Language Support dealie

THEN: You need to fire up your pal, regedit.  (which if mis-used can cause potentially fatal damage to your PC, so exercise a healthy dose of extreme paranoia and only change things you are feeling pretty sure about, unless you harbor a fetish that revolves around hours of work reinstalling software)

Go to your start-Run (on XP) and type in regedit. (this is safe so far)

Then navigate down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/Current Version/FontLink/Systemlink/  (still pretty safe)

Over in the right-hand panel, you will need to right-click, and select New-String Value:
  (This is getting scary)

Then you need to type in the name of the font you wish to link back to Arial Unicode MS.  this is the display name of the font, as seen in the font folder.

Once that is done, you will have a new string value that finds itself in need of some value data.  you need to put in two things here: the actual name of the font file (in this case ARIALUNI.TTF) and the display name after that, separated by a comma. (In this case Arial Unicode MS) It looks like this once you are done:



Then Restart your machine. (I missed this the first time around when I did this, and nothing happened save a crushing sense of defeat)

When you fire back up you should have a charmingly capable font that looks good and falls back to your wingding of choice.



Ta-dah!

I assume that this works the same on Vista, but I am unable to test that out at the moment.

Linking fonts in order to use rating stars

Reply #1 –
This looks very nice. I'll try it out soon.

Linking fonts in order to use rating stars

Reply #2 –
I've tried this, but it doesn't work here, or am I doing something wrong? I'm trying to link Corbel, which I use for Columns UI, to Tahoma, which contains the ratings glyphs I want to use:


I'm using Windows XP SP3.

Linking fonts in order to use rating stars

Reply #3 –
Quote from: MC Escher on
I've tried this, but it doesn't work here, or am I doing something wrong? I'm trying to link Corbel, which I use for Columns UI, to Tahoma, which contains the ratings glyphs I want to use:


I'm using Windows XP SP3.


I'm not sure, it looks like you did it exactly correctly.  Is Corbel an Open or True Type font?  This apparently only works with Open or TrueType fonts. 

Also, looks like your system is using the german language.  I can't see why that would matter, but perhaps it is.