Kangaroo Court {concept47 blog}

What font does Windows Live Mail use for its UI?

March 6th, 2008

Segoe UI.

How do I know this and why am I posting it? Read on …

A long time ago, I installed about 833 fonts on my system. But over the years, I came to realize that a lot of the fonts were crap, looked exactly alike or were never going to be used.

So I grabbed the excellent font management software, The Font thing, and cleaned up shop. Whittling down my font count down to 300+.

Tired (it took an hour and a half), I went to use my email program (Windows Live Mail) . That was when I realized the fonts were bolded … everywhere. I knew instantly that I had deleted the font that it was using for its UI.

Windows Live Mail was trying to compensate by using the only version of the font it could find, which was the Bolded version. If I had deleted all of the font (bold, italic etc), it would probably have defaulted to an entirely different font … and given me a painful headache.

I thought for a couple of days about how I would find the font, without going through all my installed font faces to find one that had a bold version, but no normal version.

Eventually realizing that the font that Live Mail uses, isn’t a standard system font … I figured that if I sorted the Fonts in the C:\Windows\Fonts folder by “Date Modified” … the font I was looking for would be at the top of the list.

I did the sort … and sitting right there was a Segoe UI Bold … with no normal version. (Usually there is an italic, bold and bold italic version of a font).

I moseyed on down to my trash can, found the corresponding Segoe UI fonts …  restored them and all was well with the universe

But I made this post, just in case someone … somewhere ever has the same problem …
Segoe UI … that’s your answer!

Entry Filed under: bootcamp, microsoft, ui, windows