Re: Make Jump! Music Discovery Piano work in windows XP

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Posted by Dr. John Zeigler on January 20, 2004 at 12:33:25:

In Reply to: Re: Make Jump! Music Discovery Piano work in windows XP posted by Kathy on December 29, 2003 at 13:16:02:


: We also tried adding the PDS fonts to XP without any success. Since they are in the PDS software, I would suspect that they are relying on a system font to be effective. Whatever the problem or solution, I also love this program and would like to be added to any email list that finds the solution
: : : I suspect it is a installation program problem. I tried manually adding the Jump music fonts (that actually provide the notes for the screen) because they failed to install, but it still doesn't work.

: : I am willing to help fund a solution. PDS is the best s/w of its type that I have tried.

: : Below is some more information on the problem. I am pretty certain it is a font problem as you will see. Perhaps some of the font software vendors would be willing to help.

: : I also have the "note problem" in XP. PDS comes with two font files and the one that appears to have the notes in it is harmony.ttf. I still have a Win98 machine running with PDS installed so experimented with it.

: : I notice that the font files are not installed in the windows font directory (Win98). It appears that the fonts are used directly from the PDS directory. If I rename the harmony.ttf font file in the PDS directory, then my Win98 PDS displays the same "note problem" symptom.

: : The other font file (jumptfont.fon) does not seem to affect the note display. I think it is used for annotation on the main PDS screens because those seem to change when I rename the file. Curiously, the program does not complain when harmony.ttf is missing, but it does complain when jumptfont.fon is missing (although it will run anyway).


: : I'm the Editor of the Piano Education Page at http://pianoeducation.org. We reviewed PDS in two versions several years ago and gave it the highest ratings. A few of our visitors have reported the same problem. I've looked into this problem a little. It's likely due to the fact that XP requires registered fonts to be copied to the default fonts directory. This indicated by the following statement: "To prevent a font from loading without removing it from the hard disk, move the font from the Fonts folder into another folder." from Knowledgebase article 314960.

Thus, a likely solution to the problem is, again quoting from the KB article: " # Click Start, and then click Run.
# Type %windir%\fonts, and then click OK.
# On the File menu, click Install New Font.
# In the Drives box, click the drive that has the floppy or CD-ROM that contains the fonts you want to add. If you are installing fonts from a floppy disk, this is typically drive A or drive B. If you are installing the fonts from a compact disc, your CD-ROM drive is typically drive D. Double-click the folder that contains the fonts.
# Click the fonts you want to add. To select more than one font at a time, press and hold down the CTRL key while you click each font.
# Click to select the Copy Fonts To Fonts Folder check box. The Windows\Fonts folder is where the fonts that are included with Windows are stored.
# Click OK"

This should add the fonts to the registry and copy them to the correct folder from the relevant PDS directory. I haven't tried this yet, so I can't be certain it will work, but it seems highly likely. In any event, you can't hurt your system by copying the fonts to the %windir%\fonts folder and making sure they are registered. Please let me know if this works.

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