Only some fonts showing in collections

I’m on the latest version of Fontbase (2.22.67), on Windows 11, and I can’t remember if this started before or after I upgraded from my previous version, that was probably a year old.

The issue is that I have fonts in my collections, that are now not showing up anymore in Fontbase. For example, one collection says there are 217 fonts in it - Fontbase is showing me 11. Another collection has 12, and Fontbase shows 4. There are both TTF and OTF fonts showing, so that is not the problem.

Let’s say I activate the entire collection that Fontbase says have 12 fonts, but only showing 4 - the four fonts that are showing gets the solid green circle, indicating they are all activated. But the collection itself is still only the green outlined, non-filled circle. So it “knows” there are more fonts in the collection, but they aren’t shown or activated.

I really, really don’t want to redo my collections and sort them again, as it takes a lot of time.

Hello @sqrddsgn, thank you for your post and welcome to the forum :folded_hands:
This is expected behaviour. Looks like you’ve added some fonts to the respective collections, but at some point they were removed from the folders that FontBase is tracking.
Collections remember the fonts that were added even if their source files were later moved/deleted. This eliminates the need to re-add the fonts to collections once the files themselves are added back to the application.

Thank you again,

And that would make sense, if I had removed or deleted fonts from my hard drive - but I haven’t moved or deleted any fonts on my system. Thing is, there are hundreds of fonts missing in total, from the different collections. I have not moved them from the root folder, that has stayed the same since I built this PC two years ago.

But anyway, now I have spent my working time on trying to figure out what is happening, and I wanted to share what I did and found out:

  • When I upgraded my installed version of the application, the new version automatically changed my root folder to C:\users\name\Fontbase - my root folder have always been in another location (just another drive in the same PC).
  • I changed the root folder in Fontbase settings back to its original path, outside of C:\
  • When I add a Watched folder, or manually add fonts, they do not even show up in Fontbase. The watched folder is empty in Fontbase, even though it contains fonts that worked previously.

So, I tried renaming the Fontbase folder in the C:\users\name folder, to see if that helped. Problem is, that folder is entirely impossible to move, rename or delete, because it is used by System.

So, I check Windows Settings (Control panel, basically) and go to Personalization > Fonts. And there we find over 600 fonts, that now have the installed file path C:\users\name\Fontbase (so not C:\Windows\Fonts). These fonts also seem to match up with the all the fonts that do not show up in Fontbase.

Not sure how Fontbase activates these fonts in Windows, but Windows consider these “installed” - hence why I cannot do anything with the C:\users\name\Fontbase folder, as the System is “using” them, I assume. It’s like trying to delete the C:\Windows\fonts folder.

And since Fontbase don’t show them, I can’t deactivate them either - and doing “Uninstall” manually on 600 fonts in the Settings/Personalization window is of course not an option.

Finally, just to try something, I changed the root folder back to the C:\users one, and now I can see the fonts that Windows consider “installed” in Settings (which is strange, as I could not see them in the first place, which is what led me down this path). The only remaining issue now is that its the wrong root folder path, I’d like to use the one I’ve always had, but that recreates the issue..

At least now I can see the fonts, so one step forward at least.

Thank you for the quick reply and the additional investigation @sqrddsgn :folded_hands:
We recommend really trying to avoid adding the system fonts folder into FontBase as it can conflict with the OS’s default font management (including not being able to activate/deactivate these fonts properly).
If this is absolutely a must, then viewing the system fonts and adding/removing them from collections should be safe, but as for using all the other functionality - it’s really inadvisable.

Thank you again,

Sorry, that is not what I did at all - sorry if my post was long, maybe it was unclear, but the sytem fonts folder had nothing to do with it. I have not done anything with the system fonts folder.

The problem started when I installed the latest version of Fontbase, and the application changed my root folder. When I changed the root folder location back to my original folder that I have always used, is when it became worse.

If you have the time, please re-read my post :slight_smile:

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Thank you for the additional explanation @sqrddsgn and sorry for misreading some parts of the previous posts :pensive_face:
Is it possible that FontBase’s read/write permissions (for the original Root folder path) are limited by your OS or some other software? There were no recent changes to the process of adding and displaying fonts in the app updates as far as I know, so the behaviour you’ve described seems very strange indeed :thinking:
In the original post you’ve mentioned that some fonts are missing in collections. Would it be possible for you to have a look at the original Root folder (the one outside of C:) to see if those missing fonts are physically present there?

Thank you again,