The fonts directory is freaking huge in Vista

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/10/10 12:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/10/10/813347.aspx


David (who is on the Vista beta) notes:

Forgive my ignorance, but anyone else notice that \windows\fonts is about
308 megs in size?.  Why are some fonts like 10 megs or bigger, are they
language fonts?  I understand that .TTC are font collection, but even some
.TTF have large file sizes.  

Good point (and there is no ignorance here at all David, you are right on here!). The font folder is pretty damn big in Vista....

Of course big is a relative term. After all, if you install of the Complex Script/East Asian language support on Server 2003, your fonts folder will be about 293 mb in size. And that is before all of the Vista suport for Mongolian, Khmer, Tibetan, Lao, Inuktitut, Oriya, Sinhalese, Ethiopic, all of the new Extension A/Extension B support for CJK, all of the upgrades to the core fonts, and everything else were done.

The fact that the size was kept to a mere 15 mb increase even though so much more of the world is covered is fairly impressive if you ask me. :-)

Now the truth (which I mentioned way back in May of last year in What isn't in the default install for NLS) is that there are a lot of people out there who have been cursing the fact that language support has been an option all of this time, because not everyone who needs the support later has permission to install it. Everything is now in the default install in Vista, so you now have full support for the input and use of every Vista-supported script and language....

 

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# Ben Bryant on 10 Oct 2006 1:36 PM:

pre-installed multi-language fonts is a HUGE value, and it has got to be one of the number one benefits of Vista.

# antonio on 10 Oct 2006 1:38 PM:

Now this one has really sold me on pestering at the office so that we upgrade developers machines from w2000pro to vista :)

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