Like many people, I have Valve's Steam installed so I can (occasionally, when I get the time :) ) play great games.

A few weeks ago, the whole UI of the steam client lost it's text, for no apparent reason.  Initially, I thought it was just an aberration, but a restart didn't solve it so I went a-hunting.

In the end I found this forum post on overclock.net referring to this article by a guy called Chris Pirillo.  Rather cleverly he has written a windows registry script which redirects a whole bunch of older fonts towards the new Vista font Segoe UI, it also fixes a bunch of Theme fonts to Segoe UI.  I ran the script, and sure enough Steam was fixed.

I thought all was well.

No-printy PDF-y

Until I wanted to send a package somewhere (seriously!) by courier.  I got to the last page, where the website asks you to print the label to be stuck on the package (you know the thing, where you get one of those new fangled 2-D barcodes and a whole host of unintelligible numbers).  So I did that, and it came out, much to my surprise, even more unintelligible than it started out.  Not a single character I saw on the screen inside the PDF reader matched with what was printed!  It was like the Font renderer was scraping the bottom of the deepest darkest depths of type-setting hell and spitting what it found on the page.

Initially, I thought it was a screw up with Foxit Reader (my preferred PDF reader as it's so light - although it does occasionally have problems when running inside an IE tab), so installed Acrobat.  No joy...

In the end I solved that particular problem by printing the PDF as an image, which worked beautifully, but of course it takes a lot longer as the amount of data getting sent to the printer is orders of magnitude larger.

I thought no more of it, until the wife needed to print a PDF and I simply couldn't get it to work.

Not all registry hacks are good

Then I remembered the aforementioned registry fix - and, weighing it up, I thought it's more important to be able to read stuff that I actually want to print than it is to see the text in Steam (in the short term!).

I figured that redirecting the fonts is probably fine, so long as the character tables of the two fonts actually match up.  Anyone who's used the 'insert symbol' feature of Word will tell you that you don't always find the same characters in the same places of two different fonts.  My only problem was that I couldn't easily revert my registry as I don't have system restore switched on.

In the end, I utilised the registry of a Vista Business x86 virtual machine from work (I'm running x64 Ultimate at home) - figuring that the deployed fonts are the same.  So I exported the original registry keys which Chris' registry file patches, deleted the current content of the same keys on my local machine, and then imported the new ones.

Et voilà, PDFs were working again.  Steam wasn't, but it was a start.

Interestingly, use of this registry hack has clearly affected Dreamweaver users as well - as there appears to be a pingback in his comments from a Dreamweaver support forum.

Fixing Steam's fonts

To fix Steam was actually very simple in the end.  Around the web you'll find this support post from Valve mentioned: http://supportwiki.steampowered.com/wiki/Missing_or_scrambled_text_in_Steam_menus

Now, you can't actually download the font - because that's illegal, and they've now removed the file.  However it used to also say (frustratingly the content has now disappeared!) if you shut down Steam, and browse to the steamapps folder of the installation (usually c:\program files[ (x86)]\steam\steamapps) and delete the file called 'winui.gcf', then restart steam - you'll find all the fonts work perfectly well.

On another note - I happen to disagree entirely with Chris Pirillo's assertion that the Vista fonts are annoying.  I really can't see what the fuss is all about.  Ultimately if you want style over substance, run Leopard!