The Trick to Installing Fonts with a VBScript or PowerShell Script

 Executive Summary:

Windows automatically recognizes fonts you drag and drop into the Fonts folder. However, if you try to install fonts by copying the file at a command prompt or through a script, you can't see them in the Fonts folder or in the Windows font listings. The problem is that fonts need to be registered. When you drag and drop them into the Fonts folder, the Windows Explorer shell copy operation triggers the registration process. If you don't use Windows Explorer, you don't get the automatic registration.

Fortunately, you can use Windows Explorer to register fonts when copying them through a script. The trick is to use the Shell.Application COM object, which is essentially what Windows Explorer uses during a drag-and-drop operation. With the Shell.Application object, you can connect to special namespaces in Windows such as the Fonts folder and perform special operations (e.g., copying) in that folder. You won't see a file copy onscreen, but it works.

Here are the steps you need to follow:

For example, the following VBScript code snippet installs the font in the file ManchuFont2005.ttf from the SourceForge Manchu Font project (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=118623):

Set sa = CreateObject("Shell.Application")Set fonts  = sa.NameSpace(20)fonts.CopyHere "C:tmpManchuFont2005.ttf"

You can install the same font with this PowerShell command:

$sa =  new-object -comobject shell.application$Fonts =  $sa.NameSpace(0x14)$Fonts.CopyHere ("C:tmpManchuFont2005.ttf")

In this command, I'm using the hexadecimal equivalent of 20—that is, 0x14—as the CLSID value. With PowerShell, you can extend this operation and install as many fonts as you want by using the pipeline and the ForEach-Object cmdlet, like this:

gci  "C:dspSpecial Fonts*.ttf" | %{$fonts.CopyHere($_.FullName)}

You can even put the PowerShell code into a script, as Install-Font.ps1 in Listing 1 shows. This means the only thing you need to do is get a collection of fonts and pipe them into Install-Font.ps1 using code such as

gci  "C:dspSpecial Fonts*.ttf" | Install-Font

Note that installing fonts is a privileged operation in Windows Vista. If you run the script from a nonprivileged account, the process won't necessarily fail; the CopyHere attempt triggers the User Account Control (UAC) dialog box, allowing it to work. Unfortunately, this happens for each and every font file in the installation set. I also recently encountered a situation on 64-bit Vista machine in which the UAC dialog box wasn't invoked and the installation silently failed. For these reasons, it's better to open a PowerShell session as administrator and use the script from there to install the fonts without any prompting.

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