Help syncing fonts across a network

Off Topic Maker Matters
1

So I’m stuck,

I’m trying to sync font folders between two Windows PCs at my office. The hard part is that the Windows Font folder is Read Only and can not be set as a sync-able folder with any software I have found. It also can not be shared on the network to the best of my knowledge. Disabling the read only feature is futile as Windows just ignores your preference even as an admin.

I’ve googled and haven’t found a way to fix it. I’m at my wits end on this.

Have any of you done this in the past?

Key Features,
2 way syncing
daily sync would be fine

Thanks,
Nick

2

I don’t think you can do this since it’s a protected folder.

3

I think you are right. I wish there was a better solution, but font managers are all garbage and no OS handles fonts all that well.

4

There is ways to get around it such as heavily modifing permissions on C:\Windows\Fonts but the Microsoft way is to setup a samba share and install them with sccm/msi installer.

However, according to a forum post on installing windows fonts via a script one could setup the share of fonts, say to D:\fonts as the source of the fonts instead of one PC’s C:\Windows\Fonts then have a schedule task do the xcopy into the C:\Windows\Fonts on each machine then update the registry with those fonts.

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5

Folder structure would look like:

Server1: smb://myhomeserver/D/Fonts
PC1: Setup a network drive named D: from server1’s smb share
PC2: Setup a network drive named D: from server1’s smb share

Both PC1 and PC2 execute xcopy D:\*.ttf C:\Windows\Fonts\ and a powershell script which updates the registry as a scheduled task

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