by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/08/18 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/08/18/4439054.aspx
If you have Windows Vista or have the beta of Windows Server 2008, you know that font folder is pretty huge.
Hell, if you are a regular reader of this blog then you might remember The fonts directory is freaking huge in Vista from October of last year and since you are a regular reader you might just trust me on this one, realizing I am not a Stephen Glass type who made up the size of the folder. :-)
Now in that post I generally defended the humongoid font folder on the basis of the whole What isn't in the default install for NLS issue. I still stand by most of that.
But for the record, I've been starring at a few fonts that seem to be 100% duplicates of each other.
As far as I can tell:
≈ Angsana UPCAngsana New
Browallia New
≈ BrowalliaUPCCordia New
≈ Cordia UPCThe only difference I can see between the UPC and the New versions is the name.
These fonts were licensed from Unity Progress Co., Ltd., and according to this thread over on Typophile they aren't in the fonts biz any more. They just happen to be some quite identical looking faces....
This is really a tempest in a teacup, I know (I mean, if 302,695,113 bytes in 388 files in your problem, then you may not believe that half of 2,357,260 bytes in 24 files is your problem, right? :-)
Now of course there are these multiple names there, and it is not as simple as just taking three of them out since that would break any application or document using the names unlucky enough to not be picked.
I wouldn't recommend deleting a bunch of files here!
So what can be done in the long run?
Well, we could use one of the many features like the previously mentioned font substitution. Or we could make three TTCs, each of which shared pretty much all of their contents but contained two fonts a piece. I like the .TTC idea myself, but then I'd like us to also stick the bold, italic, and bold italic versions in there, thus cutting down the number of actual files to 3, while still keeping 100% fidelity with the names. That just seems kine of cool to me. :-)
Anyway, here is a bit of side by side for those who want to compare for themselves:
I don't think this problem exists for the rest of the fonts (putting aside Arial vs. Helvetica stuff!).
And those square blocks are a bunch of Thai vowels and tone marks stacked on top of each other. :-)
This post brought to you by ଢ଼ (U+0b5d, a.k.a. ORIYA LETTER RHA)
# John Hudson on 18 Aug 2007 3:22 PM:
While the 'New' and 'UPC' Thai fonts appear to be identical, have you checked to see whether they behave identically? For instance, does this sequence ก์ำ render identically?
# Michael S. Kaplan on 18 Aug 2007 3:54 PM:
They appear to; they really do (though they all look bad):
The sequence is U+0e01 U+0e4c U+0e33.
(the following test will only work for you if you have these fonts installed)
ก์ำ (Angsana New)
ก์ำ (AngsanaUPC)
ก์ำ (Browallia New)
ก์ำ (BrowalliaUPC)
ก์ำ (Cordia New)
ก์ำ (CordiaUPC)
# Michael S. Kaplan on 18 Aug 2007 4:16 PM:
Anyway, none of them like the sequence (in Word or WordPad either) but you can blow them up big and they look bad the same way between the New and UPC varieties....
# Robert Milton on 29 Nov 2007 6:54 AM:
There is a difference between the UPC fonts and the normal ones - only the UPC fonts will print out correctly using VISTA. Otherwise strange things will happen to the vowel symbols.
Benny und Lilia on 4 Jan 2012 3:44 AM:
Piccolente = คอลรุฮิ