by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/08/04 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/08/04/10192772.aspx
The question I received was:
hey, thanks for being there.
i saw the list of included fonts posted previously. what I, and I think a lot of people are wondering, is how many of those fonts are necessary and how many can be deleted to make room for graphic design specific fonts.
the large number of foreign language fonts are of no use to me and I would be very happy to remove them if it was not going to crash the system.
thanks for your help
Ah.
This would be one of those traditional, good news/bad news kind of stories, I suppose....
Good in the sense that of the hundreds of megabytes of fonts, you can probably pretty much live without most of them.
But bad in the sense that due to system file protection it will be very hard to do, and if you do accomplish it you will be in one of those really unhappy states where you are constantly reminded of everything missing, and where you can run into servicing problems.
Ultimately, it really wouldn't be worth the trouble....
ErikF on 4 Aug 2011 7:20 AM:
The last time that I had to worry about that was when I had to shoehorn Windows 2000 onto a machine with a 1GB hard drive. Now I don't bother: what's 100MB of fonts on a 1TB drive? If I were a graphic designer, I would definitely keep these fonts in case I had a client who needed other languages on their product!
Simon Buchan on 4 Aug 2011 7:31 AM:
Presumably what he's *actually* wanting is what the font hiding feature Vista (or was it 7?) introduced. If you're a designer, you better not be hurting for a few hundred megs....
Michael S. Kaplan on 4 Aug 2011 8:05 AM:
Font hiding was added in Vista, though it isn't entirely clear that the issue wasn't a size one....
Joshua on 4 Aug 2011 12:10 PM:
Vista's system file protection is trivial these days. chown && rm gets the job done.