How many of the fonts are really unecessary?

[angler2229]

I have fonts in my fonts folder that don't seem to have any purpose. I am wondering which ones can safely be thrown out to save space? I know that some may be used by the system and cannot be pitched, but I am unsure which ones to protect.

My 2000 Pro computer at work has fonts like:
Arial Unicode
ADMUI3Sm
WST ENGL (etc.)
Terminal
Small Fonts
SimSun
Fixedsys
Marlett
MS Mincho
MS Sans Serif
MS Serif

My new PC at home runs XP Home and is filled with useless fonts too numerous to mention. All they produce is rectangles!

Thanks for your help!

Daniel

 

[wolluf]

Save space! How big is your fonts folder (mine is c. 24MB - 258 fonts - not much scope for space saving there).

what's prompting you to save space (you may need to invest in another drive, run cleanup, etc)?

 

[angler2229]

Yes, I am a little heavy in the fonts department too. I use PageMaker to create yearbooks (over 25 of them) and customers want all kinds of different fonts on the ads pages. It gets a little tedious scrolling through all the fonts using the Control palette. I tried to use one of the these different fonts on my new laptop and found that all I got were rectangles. Then I looked at the Character Map. I thought a lot of these fonts I had never seen before must be associated with XP. But they just display as Arabic words in the Character Map.

I decided it was time to get rid of some of these fonts, so I did. It did occur to me that some fonts are necessary to the computer system or a specific program. I think I read where Marlett is needed for something, but I am not sure.

Another I question is the WST series. I also assume that I cannot get rid of arial unicode, greek, cyr, or tur without dropping arial itself. If so, I'll learn to live with all the parts of arial.

I have looked all over the Internet to see just what fonts HAVE to stay but have been unable to locate anything.

For those who may think my font folder is full of fonts that do the same thing, I have already gone through and removed the "look alikes." But believe it or not, I still get tons of font exceptions when I open a school's yearbook. They like using weird fonts like RubberDucky, EraserHead, FlatTire, or MyBigToe! Of course, you simply cannot get these people to send you the fonts they use on a disk, so I end up matching the font as closely as possible.

So, you see I am stuck between a rock and a hard place!

Thanks for your help.

Daniel

 

[swertel]

I had that problem long ago when I had too many fonts loaded. Since I didn't know which ones were used for the text in dialogue boxes and menus for specific programs, I created another "old fonts" folder and moved the fonts into that. Then, after a certain period of time of running all my apps, if nothing appeared to be weird, I then deleted the old fonts.

I don't know how WinXP or 2000 handles fonts, but I recall that Win98 used to load all the fonts in the "fonts" folder into active memory. At that time, when my computer was supercharged at 64Mb of memory, I could hardly run any apps because the 200+ some fonts filled up the memory. I ended up trimming that number down to 50. For those fonts that I wanted handy, but not loaded in active memory, I kept in the old fonts folder.

 

[angler2229]

swertel,

I have done that before. Once I placed about half of the fonts I had in a folder, and when I restarted the machine, I had a visual nightmare. I then had to replace them all. I then removed them one at a time to see which ones affected the system. It was painful, and I don't want to go through that again. I thought some programmer would know for sure which fonts simply had to stay and which ones I could remove. I suppose I should invest in a fonts handling program.

Thanks,

Daniel