How to Rebuild Fonts Cache in Windows 8

Not very often, but sometimes fonts in Windows start to behave unexpectedly. You select one font in a text editor and Windows selects an entirely different font, or the font does not change no matter which font you select. This is usually because of the font cache corruption. This type of problems are usually fixed by restarting Windows, but if even a reboot is not able to fix the font cache corruption then you have to delete the old font cache and rebuild a new font cache. Rebuilding font cache in Windows 8 is very easy to do and after rebuilding the font cache you should be able to use all the installed fonts without any further problems.

You can follow these steps to rebuild the font cache in Windows 8:

  1. Press the hotkey Win + R to open the Run dialog. Type services.msc and press Enter to open the Services Manager.Rebuild  Font Cache in Windows 8
  2. In the Services Manager, select the service named Windows Presentation Foundation Font Cache 3.0.0.0 and click on the stop button in the toolbar. If this service is not running, then there is no need to stop the service.Rebuild  Font Cache in Windows 8
  3. Press the hotkey Win + R to open the Run dialog. Type %WinDir%\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData and press Enter.Rebuild  Font Cache in Windows 8
  4. If you have never opened this folder before, Windows will show a warning about permissions. Click on the Continue button to gain permissions. After this a folder will be opened in Windows Explorer.Rebuild  Fonts Cache in Windows 8
  5. In the opened folder, double-click on the sub-folder named Local. Inside the Local folder, you would find several files which have their names starting with ~FontCache-. Select all these files and delete them. Do not delete any folders even if they are empty.Rebuild  Fonts Cache in Windows 8
  6. Reboot your computer. When Windows restarts, it will rebuild a new font cache. Now you should not see any misplaced or strange fonts issues.

3 comments

  1. Thanks for posting these directions. I was having a problem with the text in my Start Menu (Win 10) becoming garbled over time. This seems to have fixed it, and I am grateful.

  2. It says I cannot delete these files because they are in use by Windows Explorer! There are other files in this folder without the “~” at the start of the filename. Do I delete these?

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