Have You Been Wingdinged?

Have your FileMaker layouts miraculously transformed into a collection of nonsensical symbols? Does your data resemble a prehistoric cave painting? If so, you’ve likely been wingdinged. Due to a known FileMaker bug affecting Windows computers running Adobe products, fonts can be replaced with a dingbat-style temporary font. Before translating your application character by character, try following these steps for a quick fix.

The Simple Solution

First close FileMaker completely, then close any open Adobe programs. Next, reopen FileMaker before reopening your Adobe programs. Your FileMaker fonts should now have returned to normal.

Other Things to Try

Keeping Adobe products up to date can potentially help mitigate font-related issues. To make sure you’re running the latest available version, open your Adobe program, choose the Help menu, then select Check for Updates.

There are a few advanced troubleshooting steps available if neither restarting your programs nor updating Adobe restored your FileMaker layouts to normal. Take care while attempting these fixes, as deleting the wrong file can lead to more headaches.

Delete the file “fntcache.dat” located within the C:\Windows\System32 folder, then restart your computer. Your operating system temporarily saves font data to this file. Deleting it and rebooting forces your computer to recreate it, hopefully clearing away any corrupt data.

Close any open Adobe programs, then delete the folder “acrord32_sbx” located within the C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp folder. Adobe programs save temporary files to this folder. Recreating it has been known to resolve various Adobe issues.

Hopefully these troubleshooting tips have brought your FileMaker application back from wingdingland. If you’re still running into issues, it may be time to bring in one of our experienced developers to help get things working again. We’re always happy to help, so feel free to contact us!