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.