by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/11/06 10:16 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/11/06/5928970.aspx
Allan provided me with my daily scare back in the end of September with a note to me via the Contact link:
I would so appreciate a little advice and wisdom on the font situation in vista, if you are ready, willing and able.
I wonder if all those foreign language fonts are necessary as they add what seems to me to be a huge amount of clutter when getting down to business. I also notice that I am unable to cut and paste unneeded fonts from the font folder, to back them up.
thanks for any assistance you can offer.
allan
I am ready, willing, and able now1.
Now somewhere between the big font list Simon Daniels gave me back in April 2006 (from The big font list in Windows) and the info he gave me in February 2007 (from What are the fonts in Vista?) there are clearly a great many fonts in Vista.
With all that I mentioned in that About the Fonts Folder series (parts 1, 2, and 3), I probably managed to convey the fact that not a whole lot of work has been done to make this folder cooler looking and easier to use, even as the number of fonts has gotten bigger and bigger with each successive version.
With all of that going on, I knew that after the effort to fix all of the problems I talked about with What isn't in the default install for NLS by putting everything in there that for every person who was happy with this change and all that it enables that there would be somebody else such as Allan who feels like all of the clutter makes it hard to get down to business (and who would have been happy with over 60 fonts being taken off the big list by default!).
Although I admit I am more sympathetic to the former than the latter, I do think that the user interface surrounding fonts really could use some work, something that has been true almost since the beginning. But there is no ready-made solution to change any of this, sorry about that!
But the folks who didn't have enough installed to get their work done have suffered for several versions; perhaps with the no-good-nicks out, now God's chillun get their innings? :-)
For the cut/paste issue, what about copy/paste? Or using the built in "Past versions" functionality or the built-in backup functionality? Seems like there are a lot of ways to do the backup that don't involve removing fonts....
1 - DISCLAIMER: After I got the note I initially I fell over and broke something I'd rather not talk about other than to say that the cast just came off2.
2 - DISCLAIMER: The previous disclaimer was a dramatization, though I honestly did bite my tongue accidentally when I was reading the note. No cast and it is better now.
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# Gabe on 6 Nov 2007 10:52 AM:
I suppose the font enumeration code should somehow be able to pay attention to the Hidden attribute. If you hide a font, you would still be able to ask for it by name, but it won't show up in font dialogs. That way you can still see text that happens to be written in some foreign script, but all those fonts being available wouldn't necessarily have to enlarge the font list in every app.
# Johannes Roessel on 7 Nov 2007 2:30 AM:
Well, he said that cutting/pasting fonts wasn't for backups but rather to remove clutter from the folder.
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