25th April 2002
Something always bothered me about the fonts in Windows. I mean, I had every option set to "Tahoma" under the Display Properties' Appearance tab, yet I kept seeing "MS Sans Serif" and "Microsoft Sans Serif" fonts in random dialogs. It didn't annoy me to the point where I couldn't live with it, but still - when I want one font all over my system, I mean it. I'd always seen the Font Substitutes section in Windows 9x's WIN.INI file, but I didn't pay too much attention to it. I wish I had; the "fix" was there all along. You can easily use this tip in your version of Windows, but for those of us with XP, we'll need to dive into the Registry. Find your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ FontSubstitutes. Now, before you go any further, make note of what you see here (or Export the branch for later merging). Double-click the "MS Shell Dlg" entry. Change it to whatever you want your font to see "everywhere." In my case, I chose Tahoma. By default, the System will go with either "Microsoft Sans Serif" or "MS Sans Serif." Reboot and you're set.