Keef
23rd Apr 2013, 16:13
For reasons I don't understand, this PC had over 300 fonts installed, most of them Arabic or Chinese or Korean or Japanese or Devanagari or Punjabi or ... - none of which I read or speak. Several times I've tried to remove them, but Windows said NO. It would let me "hide" them, but they didn't hide at all, the little devils.
Finally I got so fed up with wading down the interminable list, so I declared war on fonts. There was a helpful article on a geeksite on how to do it. It's not intuitive: the message "font is in use and cannot be deleted" means "you're looking at it, twit, so of course it's in use". There's a "switch" in Explorer that has to be turned off so that you can look at the list without it knowing.
Then, you can't delete a file you don't own, and all the font files belong to some bloke called "TrustedInstaller". Frankly, I wouldn't trust him as far as I can throw him, but they're his files and you aren't allowed to mess with them, so there. There's a way to change ownership, but it takes lots of mouse clicks for every style of every font you want to remove.
That makes them "mine", but still I can't delete them - oh no, I haven't given myself permission to do that. So it takes another load of clicks per style per font to change permissions to allow me to delete them.
Then, at last, SOME can be deleted. Phew!
But there's some sort of link between the various Japanese ones, and they have to be deleted in the correct order. Trial and error applies - try them all till one goes, etc. Ditto the Chinese and Korean. By comparison, Arabic was well behaved!
An afternoon later (was it worth it? will I get the time back?) I'm down from over 300 fonts to 154 and it's a lot easier.
The next piece of software that suggests installing some fonts is going to get a frosty reception!
Finally I got so fed up with wading down the interminable list, so I declared war on fonts. There was a helpful article on a geeksite on how to do it. It's not intuitive: the message "font is in use and cannot be deleted" means "you're looking at it, twit, so of course it's in use". There's a "switch" in Explorer that has to be turned off so that you can look at the list without it knowing.
Then, you can't delete a file you don't own, and all the font files belong to some bloke called "TrustedInstaller". Frankly, I wouldn't trust him as far as I can throw him, but they're his files and you aren't allowed to mess with them, so there. There's a way to change ownership, but it takes lots of mouse clicks for every style of every font you want to remove.
That makes them "mine", but still I can't delete them - oh no, I haven't given myself permission to do that. So it takes another load of clicks per style per font to change permissions to allow me to delete them.
Then, at last, SOME can be deleted. Phew!
But there's some sort of link between the various Japanese ones, and they have to be deleted in the correct order. Trial and error applies - try them all till one goes, etc. Ditto the Chinese and Korean. By comparison, Arabic was well behaved!
An afternoon later (was it worth it? will I get the time back?) I'm down from over 300 fonts to 154 and it's a lot easier.
The next piece of software that suggests installing some fonts is going to get a frosty reception!