InDesign CS6 and Arial Narrow

Question

I have been using CS5, had problems with the Arial Narrow font not showing up as four variations but only one, and eventually got it resolved somehow so that I had a separate font listed as Arial Narrow in the font name drop down list and four variations listed in the other drop down list (all distinct from the Arial font with its four variations). I know I deleted a lot of AdobeFnt*.lst files. I know I tried the hotfix that I found through a lot of Google searching, but it said it didn't apply to my system. Beyond that, I don't know what fixed the problem and I remember it feeling like a lot of trial and error, but eventually I got it solved.

A few days ago I installed CS6 on my system for the first time, and now I've got the same problem back again. I've spent all afternoon trying to resolve it but without any success.

I have three sets of TTF files for Arial Narrow, each set with four files for regular, bold, italic and bold italic. One set is version 2.20, one is version 2.37 and the other is version 2.40. My system is running Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit.

Does anyone have any idea of what will fix this problem on my system? I have a lot of InDesign documents that use Arial Narrow, so now whenever I open one of them, I have lots of missing font references. If I could get Arial Narrow reinstalled properly once again, they'd all go away.

Thanks!

Peter Spier · Accepted Answer

Dan-BTP wrote:I'm sorry I didn't make it clear about the versions of the font. I have those three versions in a personal folder, but I only have one version installed at a time. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the font multiple times, using the older versions, again with only one version installed at a time, but without success.There's a really old thread about this someplace, but the solution was to copy the fonts from a machine running XP/Office 2000, if I remember.

St3v3n_Howard · Answer

This problem is due to the offending fonts having the wrong "Preferred Family" and "Preferred Subfamily" names and it can be corrected using a Font Editor, such as the free version of Type light which can be downloaded from http://www.cr8software.net/typelight.html.

The process I found to work (in Windows 8 with Adobe Indesign CC and Office 2010) is as follows:

Open a File Explorer window and go to the system font library at C:/Windows/Fonts and double click on the Arial font (this has a special icon indicating that it contains multiple subentries)
Copy the fonts for Arial Narrow, Arial Narrow Bold, Arial Narrow Italic and Arial Narrow Bold Italic to a new folder on your desktop
Edit each of these copies using your font editor and change the Preferred Family and Preferred Subfamily names (in Type light use the menu option Font>Names... then click the Advanced button)
The Preferred Family should be changed to Arial Narrow and the Preferred Subfamily should be either Regular, Bold, Italic, or Bold Italic as per the particular font you are editing (While you are there you could also make similar changes to the Arial Black font which has the same problem - in this case, make Preferred Family Arial Black and Preferred Subfamily Regular)
Save each font file back over the top of the one in the folder on the desktop (Save and replace) then open a new File Explorer window for that folder and drag the changed fonts back into their orginal location at C:/Windows/Fonts/Arial
Open a new File Explorer window and do a search on the C: drive for all instances of AdobeFnt*.lst then delete all of them
Restart your computer

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