Strangest thing ever, I downloaded and tried to install an OpenType Font (.otf) and when I double clicked to preview the font I got the message “The requested file XXX.otf was not a valid font file”. When I tried to install it, I got “Unable to install the XXX (OpenType) font. The font file may be damaged. Check with your font vendor about obtaining a new file.” This was frustrating as all hell because the fonts should have worked, to double check I sent them to another machine where they opened fine.
After some googling around I found that a number of people were having this same issue on machines running Nvidia cards. As I’m on a Dell Prevision M6300 with an Nvidia Quadro FX 1600M, I guessed that this Nvidia issue was probably the culprit. Everyone suggested upgrading to the latest drivers, which is always a smart move. I tried that with the drivers from Dell and unfortunately it did not help (as the drivers hadn’t been updated in 7 months). I popped over to LaptopVideo2Go (which I knew of from my Vista graphics driver issue days) and grabbed a copy of the Nvidia Forceware 180.70 which was from November. While not the latest, luckily for me, it was good enough. Another install and reboot later… and I had working OpenType Fonts.
Now not to be mean or anything, but why the hell does the graphics card “corrupt” fonts? And how did this get past QA? Almost all the “new” fonts (like the ones you’d have coming from Adobe) are in OTF. Since I’m sure more than a few graphic artists use Nvidia cards… you’d think they’d check these kind of things… Oh well.