Fonts Display Incorrectly if More than 48 MB Worth of Fonts Exists

ID: Q219298

The information in this article applies to:

SYMPTOMS

When you run any program that includes True Type fonts (for example, Windows NT shell, Microsoft Office, Microsoft WordPad, and so forth), you may experience the following symptoms:

This article does not apply to printer fonts. Printer font output is not impacted by the 48 MB limit.


CAUSE

This behavior occurs because there is a 48 MB memory limit for fonts on a computer running Windows NT 4.0. After a computer running Windows NT reaches the 48 MB font limit, that session's fonts are displayed incorrectly as there is no room available to load and map fonts.


RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows NT 4.0. For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q152734 How to Obtain the Latest Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack


STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT 4.0. This problem was first corrected in Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 5.


MORE INFORMATION

For example, a computer running Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 with Office 2000 installed has approximately 20 MB of total fonts. If you enable the Japanese (8 MB), Korean (15 MB), and Chinese (8 MB) language settings, you reach approximately 51 MB of total fonts.

The 48 MB limit is easily reached on a computer running Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4 with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and Office 2000 without enabling fonts for other languages. You can reach this limit by browsing Web pages. IE5 automatically installs fonts not currently loaded.

Simply deleting True Type fonts to an amount lower than the 48 MB limit may not resolve the issue.

You can view the fonts loaded on your computer by using the Control Panel Fonts tool. You can view the size of each font by opening a command prompt and going to the \%SystemRoot%\Font folder and typing DIR. If the size of the \%SystemRoot%\Font folder is equal to or greater than 48 MB, you may experience this issue.

Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 5 increases the font limit to 128 MB.

Additional query words: blank spaces chinese strange characters word wordpad IE5 IE5.0 Office 97 2000 Office97 Office2000 TrueType 


Keywords          : nt4sp5fix 
Version           : winnt:4.0,4.0 SP1,4.0 SP2,4.0 SP3,4.0 SP4
Platform          : winnt 
Issue type        : kbbug

Last Reviewed: June 18, 1999