Can’t Use Text in PSCS3: Text Engine Won’t Initialize

MM
Posted By
Michelle_McCarty
Aug 21, 2008
Views
724
Replies
4
Status
Closed
Hi!

I just upgraded to Photoshop CS3 and have a baffling problem.

I am trying to create a new document with text, but whenever I grab the text tool and try to draw out where to put it I get this error message:
"Could not complete your request because something prevented the text engine from being initialized."

Any ideas what might cause this and how to fix it?

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John Joslin
Aug 21, 2008
It could be a corrupt font. How many fonts do you have installed?

Do a search for and delete all instances of adobefnt*.lst (that extension is .LST).

And if a broken or corrupted font is causing problems there is no alternative in the long run to tracking it down and deleting it.
MM
Michelle_McCarty
Aug 21, 2008
Hi John,

Well I updated Photoshop and this problem seems to be gone. But it is good to know about the fontlist thing.

I don’t have a ton of fonts installed as I use FontExpert to manage the ones I use.

Looks to be OK for now!
ND
Nathan_Danielson
Aug 22, 2008
John, I am running CS2 in Windows and have been getting the error "Could not complete your request because of a program error", often followed by an error referring to the text engine.

I would like to take your advice given to Michelle regarding deleting all instanced of adobefnt*.lst, but before I do, I wanted to confirm that this will not delete all of my fonts. If it does, is there an easy, surefire way to reinstall the ones I need?

Thanks, Nathan
P
Phosphor
Aug 22, 2008
Nathan…

Deleting AdobeFnt*.lst files is perfectly safe. All it does is removes catalogs of the font names used by applications. The fonts themselves aren’t touched.

Just do a system-wide search for adobefnt. There may be a number after AdobeFnt and before the .lst, or there may not be a number. You may safely delete all of them. They will rebuild themselves as needed.

Just make sure you don’t delete files with a file suffix of .db

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