by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/05/27 01:36 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/05/26/2909957.aspx
Mihai Suba asked over in the Suggestion Box:
Is there a way to make Windows aware of a font copied in WINDOWS/FONTS by a program, without a restart or click-open that folder?
For reference, I'll pull out the following two blog posts in a series entitled About the Fonts folder in Windows:
This technique of opening the folder and copying the file there programmatically is now history as of Vista (as pointed out in part 3 above), and there was no documented mechanism to ask the fonts folder to do this work other than letting it detect the change and process it, in earlier versions.
Parts 1 and 2 talk about the supportable way to make this work across all versions of Windows.
And if you want the truly supported version that does all the work for you, fontinst.exe can be retrieved from the Microsoft FTP site here (just right click on the link and save it somewhere).
Unfortunately all of the samples that have the created fontinst.inf seem to have gone missing from the Microsoft site, so you'll have to search around if you want to find one the samples....
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