Maplex labels are not displayed or appear garbled

Description

When displaying labels using Maplex, they do not appear or else appear garbled. If the label engine is switched to the Standard Label Engine, the labels appear normally.

Cause

The labels are being displayed using a Type 1 font or an Open Type font that is Type 1 based, and Windows font smoothing is turned on for the machine.

Determine which type of font is being used by looking at the file icon and the file extension in the \WINDOWS\Fonts directory.

· Type 1 font
This font has a red lower case 'a' as an icon and the file extension is '.pfm'

· Open Type font (Type 1 based)
This font has a green upper case 'O' as an icon and the file extension is '.otf'

Workaround

1. Navigate to Start > Settings > Control Panel.
2. Double-click Display.
3. On the Display Properties dialog box, select the Appearance tab and click the Effects button.
4. Uncheck the 'Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts' check box.
5. Click OK to exit all of the dialog boxes.
6. Refresh the ArcMap display. Labels appear correctly now that the Windows Font Smoothing is turned off.