A year and a half ago, I posted about Adobe Type Manager’s incompatibility with Vista and the implications for multiple master (MM) fonts. ATM is of course discontinues and unsupported on Vista, but it turns out there are workarounds, which I should share.

A couple of people told me about workarounds. One clever engineer at Microsoft pointed out that one could manually edit the Windows registry to create entries for one’s MM font to make the instances work (at least the already defined ones – not sure if you could create new instances this way).

However, the more general-purpose workaround, which an end-user pointed out to us (in the Adobe User to User Forums, IIRC), is to disable the much-hated User Account Control (UAC) in Vista. This compromises some of Vista’s enhanced security, but it allows you to run ATM and use MM fonts, if that’s more important to you.

1. Login as administrator.
2. Start > Run > msconfig.
3. Tools > select “Disable User Account Control” > push Launch
4. Reboot system.
5. Install your fonts with ATM and create instances.

If you don’t want to permanently reduce your security, you can then turn UAC back on.

6. Start > Run > msconfig.
7. Tools > select “Enable User Account Control” > push Launch.
8. Reboot system again.