Fonts
 

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!

No, you could have installed some font management software instead, Extensis Suitcase for example.

But hey, you taught yourself a couple of new skills.

Just like the junk you threw out then wanted the next week you can bet you will want that Swahili font one day! http://images.ibsrv.net/ibsrv/res/sr...ilies/nerd.gif

I know one Swahili word, and it is entirely appropriate for the pooter threads.

It is "Hatinafsi" Or I think it is that......

it means something like "jfdi", with an added nuance of "don't ask, someone might say no"

No new skills learned :( Just a lot of old ones used rather more than I'd have liked. I tried a "font management" package (not that one) - it didn't work.
I have a suspicion that some of the dross arrived with an earlier "font manager" when I was trying to get a decent Hebrew font. I later found a proper TrueType set.

Swahili fonts are not a problem - we sing Swahili songs in our choir.
You can have a good laff at us lot singing.

In your line of work surely getting rid of fonts would be the last thing you'd want to do?

I took me a moment.:D