True-type fonts that I installed not rendered in Visual Studio 2010 Text editor

Question

I am trying to change the font for the Text Editor in VS 2010 Ultimate on a machine running Win XP Professional SP3 (32bit), and it does not render any installed fonts correctly - works fine with the default fonts though. (At first, I thought it was only with Monaco font, but I recently realized that it's more than that.)

I have tested with some fonts, including Inconsolata, Futurist fixed-width and Monaco on my PC, and if I change the font to any true-type font that I installed, the font renders as Consolas although the font name in the Fonts and Colors window shows the new font name.

I was successfully able to apply Monaco font on a colleague's machine (we both have the same OS and VS editions). I could also change the font in VS 2008 on my machine, that looks fine as well. Also, I can change the font to any of the above said fonts in my MS Word and Excel applications, so I don't think it is a system-wide problem.

I came across this very old post on SO that addresses a similar issue (which might not even be relevant to the 2010), but I did try some of the techniques listed for what it's worth without any success.

This is what I did so far (not necessarily in the same order), and nothing worked -

• Resetting the Visual Studio as per the suggestion in the comments
• Restart the IDE after installing the font
• Close VS, un-install and re-install the font, and open VS again
• Open VS in safe mode, disable the extensions, re-open VS again
• Repair/reinstall the Visual Studio

Is it a possibility that my VS is corrupted? (If that's the case, wouldn't repairing have fixed that?)

I also learnt from a Microsoft Connect bug that VS 2010 text editor has been rebuilt using WPF - could that be what is causing the issue? The strange thing is, I can successfully set the environment font (the font for VS menus, solution explorer window, etc.) to any font I like - I cannot set the font only for the windows where we can type text, like the Text Editor, Watch window, Immediate Window, etc.

Did anyone else come across this kind of problem? Does anyone have a solution? I am out of ideas now, and my last resort seems to be uninstalling VS completely and re-installing (but again, I am not sure if that will work either).

Answer 1

The issue looks to be with the way I had Visual Studio installed on my machine - last week, my PC started freezing and giving the fabled BSOD all of a sudden - the tech support guys suggested to re-image the machine, which I reluctantly agreed to since that was the cure-all for my aging machine. Today, the support engineer stopped by and swapped my existing hard drive with the new one they built for me - they had been kind enough to push my current applications onto the new image.

After the swap finished uneventfully, and the support guy did some sanity checks and gave a thumbs up, I installed the Monaco font again (from the same source as I did originally), and applied the new font, and opened a new project - and, lo and behold, I now see my code in Monaco font! Feels good to see Monaco font on my machine - this has been eluding me for about 8 months. I still am not sure what fixed the issue, but I am glad I could finally put an end to the frustration I had been having.