Removing foreign language fonts

Fonts for all languages are included in all copies of Windows 7 because we have no way to know that a user is interested in only this or that language. E.g., just because the copy of Windows was sold in the US and the UI language is English, that doesn't imply that the user has no interest in other languages.

Now, we recognize that for any user there will be only so many languages of interest and so fonts meant for other languages are not relevant. For that reason, we did some work in Windows 7 to pick smart defaults (that the user can tailor) to hide fonts so that they don't appear in pick lists. There were some constraints we had to adhere to, and that prevented us from making changes to the way GDI enumerates fonts; and as a result, while we can filter lists in font-picker UI that Windows provides, we can't filter lists in apps such as Word or Photoshop that create their own font-picker UI. This is a limitation we are aware of and may consider for future product releases.

Also, we recognize that hiding fonts may not be enough: that fonts consume system and application resources and can impact perf in those areas. There are various things we may consider to address these concerns in future product releases. In the mean time, our intent was to give users freedom to uninstall fonts they don't plan to use -- though within certain limits: we want to protect a minimal set of fonts that would be needed so that UI elements can be displayed in any language. Our reasons are that, in this connected day and age, users can end up being presented with content in potentially any language, and we want to ensure that they do not see square-box (.notdef) glyphs. Now, again, there are potentially things that we might do in future product releases that would allow us to ensure that while allowing a user to limit the fonts that an app like Photoshop loads; for Windows 7, those were beyond what we were able to achieve. So, we are stuck with a limitation that we will protect certain fonts covering all the languages we support, and therefore apps like Photoshop will load them.

Because different fonts have been used in different generations of UI design, the number of fonts we need to protect in this manner is a little bigger than it might have been hypothetically. For instance, Simsun is an older-generation UI font for Simplified Chinese, Microsoft YaHei is the AERO-theme UI font for Simplified Chinese, and so we end up protecting both. That issue doesn't add too many more fonts to lists, though.

Unfortunately, there were some fonts that were not supposed to be protected but were. This is a bug that we are aware of.

So, looking at some of the cases mentioned earlier in this thread:

• Plantagenet Cherokee and Euphemia are protected because these are the UI fonts for Cherokee and Canadian Syllabics
• Aharoni, Andalus, and Angsana (UPC / New) are all fonts that can be deleted by the user
• Aparajita is a case that was not intended to be protected but, due to a bug, is.

Now, I can tell by looking over the thread that some may say, "But I really don't care if I see a square box glyph instead of a Naskapi Waa." I can understand that. From a product perspective, we need to make choices in terms of what can reasonably managed to provide the best overall customer experience. Today, that is to make sure that minimal set of UI fonts is always there. As mentioned earlier, perhaps in future releases it may be possible to do more.

Btw, there are popular apps that install more fonts than those that ship with Windows, so the length of font lists is more impacted by those. Of course, Windows doesn't do anything that should hinder you from uninstalling any of those fonts.

I hope this is of some help.

Peter

I too find it fairly puzzling why Asian/Middles East/Arabic font sets even show up in the fonts folder of an English lingo system? - why are those installed by default at all? Logically it should be optional (manual add) at best.

EXACTLY!! In defense of Windows 7 I must say that I like the OS overall (the Libraries concept just doesn't make sense to me, but that's another topic). This font thing, however, has me scratching my head in befuddlement - WHY ARE THEY HERE in this language pack at ALL with the user given no choice to NOT add them?

I too find it fairly puzzling why Asian/Middles East/Arabic font sets even show up in the fonts folder of an English lingo system? - why are those installed by default at all? Logically it should be optional (manual add) at best. The deeper you look into Win7 the more you get annoyed by useless features, sorry, I have to say that!

Hello,

The rationality behind this is that the User Interface fonts should be System Folder Protected, and content fonts should not, so, some foreign fonts (such as Aparajita to write Indian Devanagari) are System Folder Protected when they should not (at least not on a English Windows 7). We are currently working towards a better experience uninstalling in box fonts.The alternative is to hide the fonts rather than removing them, but for the moment that solution just works on in box apps like Wordpad. We are also looking forward to make this solution available to all Apps.

Regarding the question about which are the truly important fonts for Win7, that would depend on the Win7 display language.

So having said this, I would not recommend uninstalling any System Protected font (since the system is not designed for this and there are things that depend on them).

I hope this info is useful for you.

-Gyan