Problems with Arial Black?

We encountered a strange situation recently with the font Arial Black in PowerPoint: all instances of the font suddenly turned italic. Nothing we could think to do removed the italic formatting. And even odder, this problem only occurred on certain workstations.

After some sleuthing on Google, we discovered that the Windows Service Pack 3 upgrade apparently installs a new version of Arial Black that doesn’t perform correctly. Some of our workstations automatically installed the upgrade and some had not.

The solution is simple:

  • Go to C:WINDOWSFonts folder and delete the existing Arial Black file: ariblk.ttf
  • Now go to C:WINDOWS$NtServicePackUninstall$ and locate ariblk.ttf (same file name but it will be the older version of Arial Black).
  • Copy and paste this file into the C:WINDOWSFonts folder.

Arial Black will now function as it should.

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