How-To Guides

Create MSI Installer: Packaging a Custom Font for Deployment

If you would like to build an installer to install a custom font on a machine, then you can use Visual Studio to do this.

By Andrew Armstrong • 2 min read
Create a MSI file to install a custom font

If you need to package a custom font as a proper Windows installer — rather than asking users to manually right-click and install a .ttf/.otf file — Visual Studio’s installer project type handles this cleanly, including registering the font correctly so Windows recognises it everywhere, not just as a file sitting in a folder.

Steps

  1. Open Visual Studio and create a new Setup Project (Installer Project).
  2. In the File System editor, right-click File System on Target Machine > Add Special Folder > Fonts Folder.
  3. Add your font file(s) into the Fonts folder you just created.
  4. For each font file, open its Properties window and change the Register property from vsdrfDoNotRegister to vsdrfFont.

Registering the font is the step people usually miss — without it, the file gets copied into the Fonts folder but Windows won’t actually recognise or list it as an installed font. Once the Register property is set correctly, build the installer and test it on a clean machine to confirm the font shows up in applications immediately after install, with no reboot required.

You’ll Need the Installer Projects Extension First (Updated for 2026)

Worth flagging before you start: the “Setup Project” type used above isn’t built into Visual Studio anymore and hasn’t been since 2015 — it’s now a free, separate Marketplace extension (“Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects 2022”), which needs to be installed before this project type appears in the New Project dialog. If Visual Studio’s newest release gives you trouble with it, falling back to Visual Studio 2022 tends to be the more reliable option, since that’s what the extension is built and tested against. If you’re setting this up fresh rather than maintaining an existing project, it’s also worth considering WiX or MSIX as Microsoft’s actively-developed alternatives, though the Setup Project steps above remain the simplest path for a single custom font.

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Andrew Armstrong

Andrew Armstrong is a UK-based IT professional with 26+ years of hands-on experience in Windows, Windows Server, SCCM/ConfigMgr, Active Directory, PowerShell, and enterprise infrastructure.

He founded TechyGeeksHome in 2010 and has published over 1,500 practical guides covering real-world IT problems and solutions. When not solving IT problems,

Andrew develops free Windows utilities including Ultimate Settings Panel, which has been downloaded over 850,000 times.

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7 thoughts on “Create MSI Installer: Packaging a Custom Font for Deployment”

  3. Thanks big time AJ. Heads up for other SA’s trying to push out MSI’s (for fonts, etc.) via Intune…these instructions for the MSI work fabulously. Some extra information for newbies:

    Once you download Visual Studios 2017 (Community version is fine), you have to make sure you have the installer extension installed to be able to create an installer project. (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44286704/create-setup-msi-installer-in-visual-studio-2017)

    Also, the system I did this on did not have the fonts installed yet, so I did not have to do the extra step of changing the Register property for each font.

    When you finish putting the fonts into the project, make sure you build the project and you can pull the .msi file from the build folder stated in the output at the bottom of the Visual Studio IDE.

    As an FYI, if you want to deploy this MSI with Intune (using these instructions [I have no tie to the author]: https://www.anoopcnair.com/intune-beginners-guide-deploy-msi-application/), this MSI works perfectly with Intune. and /quiet command line arguments.

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