Troubleshooting Programs Looking Weird – Is Tahoma Installed?
Troubleshooting Programs
What to do when you can’t figure out why your installed programs aren’t looking right
Every once in a while, I find that all of the menus in a program are looking weird. The fonts are too large so that text runs out of windows and menus. This is particularly problematic in Microsoft applications like Outlook and Word. I also ran into a similar problem once when installing the Adobe Creative Suite. It would install fine, some of the programs wouldn’t startup. I searched everywhere on the web for help troubleshooting programs and the solution and found nothing. My computer had more than all of the documented specifications for the programs. So I started at the basics of software development to find an answer. Software programs, just like websites, rely on certain fonts to be installed to display correctly. While Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Verdana have long been core fonts for a PC, the list has expanded significantly over the years. The secret to resolving these weird problems lies with the font Tahoma. Should you intentionally or unintentionally uninstall it, strange things will start to happen with your programs. Fixing the problem is actually very easy – reinstall the font.
- Reinstalling with a Font Manager – If you have a font manager software program installed such as Bitstream Font Navigator, simply open the program and reinstall it.
- Windows – If you are using Windows, open the Control Panel, then the Fonts folder. If you don’t see the File menu, click on the Alt button on your keyboard. Click File, and then click Install New Font. In the Add Fonts dialog box, under Drives, click the drive where the font that you want to install is located. Under Folders, double-click the folder containing the fonts that you want to add. Under List of fonts, click the font that you want to add, and then click Install. If you don’t know the location of the font, do a search for it first using the Windows Search feature.
Once the font is installed, close the program having a problem, then reopen it. If the problem had to do with the missing Tahoma font, it should be repaired.
