Removing foreign language fonts

Fine! But Windows users shouldn't be obliged to risk the sudden death of their system by having to edit the Registry. It should be abundantly clear to Microsoft that they committed a major blunder by not making these bloatware fonts optional and by not making it as easy to get rid of them as other unwanted fonts.

But it looks like Microsoft has been backed into a corner and is refusing to admit that the firm got it wrong. And will a company in denial be in any hurry to solve the problem in Service Pack 2, Service Pack 3 or even Windows 8?

Have mercy, you rotters.

Regards ...

Hi, Gyan!

One year one and no closer to a solution.

Regards ...

I am not sure the manual moving about of fonts is an issue confined to 7. I would think that any version of Windows presents similar difficulties. As long as Microsoft continues to develop Windows over this registry thing, it will be difficult to customize it manually. All the super-geeks love to tinker in their registry, but the majority of users would rather not go there, and I think they are wise not to.

Just now I searched for "font manager windows" and got 40 million results. I'm sure only a handful of the top twenty are useful, but it shows that there are third-party solutions.

I also use OS X, and can offer a few "stuff that dreams are made of" facts:

-- OS X has three locations for fonts. Here they are, and remember that / at beginning of path indicates the root of the boot volume, and whatever follows indicates sub-folders:

/System/Library/Fonts -- Apple says never move them, total 39 files.

/Library/Fonts -- about 73 files installed by OS X. All other apps that install fonts will copy them to this place.

/Users/your account/Library/Fonts -- You can move fonts here if you have some reason to keep other users from having access to them.

-- Of the 39 fonts installed at the "System" level, only 5 are essential to OS X. You can throw out all the others if you really don't care for them, but you must type your admin password to overcome the System protection. One other font is used as the default font for the Terminal (command line app), so if you don't change the preferences for Terminal to another font, it won't work after deleting the Monaco font. I don't think Windows could possibly need more than ten fonts as the basic launch and GUI group.

-- OS X, like Linux, is not plagued with a registry, so nothing can get nasty as long as you stay clear of the holy five system fonts.

I have 483 fonts in my main OS X system (715 MB total). That can slow the launching of apps as well as give me a mile-long list to scroll through, so I just make a folder called "Fonts-disabled", and move all the weird and seldom-used ones there. If I need to use one of those, I move it back, relaunch the app that needs to use that font, and it works. That's my font manager, the mouse.

As for Windows, I understand why MS is not forthcoming about fonts (They have to protect semi-pro tinkerers from wrecking the system.), but the third-party font manager developers know what they can mess with, so it shouldn't be too hard to find out what fonts can be moved and which cannot. I assume the font manger apps use some "font in RAM" technique to avoid having to do registry tinkering.

As for this anti-foreign fonts idea, even Apple installs 16 non-Western fonts plus two symbol fonts in the basic System that are used to display non-Western web pages. I could save about 150 MB by tossing them, but I wouldn't, especially since I often switch between Chinese and English..

As for why fonts intended for non-Western scripts include Western script data, how else could someone type "删除的DVD播放机 ("Remove the DVD player")? Also, this is not any doing of Microsoft in relation to Windows development as one comment suggested ("one advantage of Windows 7 over XP"). This type of font is called unicode (http://www.unicode.org/consortium/memblogo.html).

I agree with the general consensus that the near-monopoly status of Windows causes complacency for MS, so we can't expect any big changes (like dropping the whole DOS-like registry thing) any time soon. MS couldn't even drop BIOS support for Windows Vista, because the PC makers refused to tool-up with new boards. Will we see modern EFI PCs for Windows 8? Not likely. MS will continue to fall further behind in technology until finally the whole house of cards collapses.

Chris H, what and where is  "Start Orb"?I understand making sure I get permission as administrator to go forward and a=have system permission for masking changes, but how can I get a list of System Fonts so as to not delete any of them?Shouldn't System Fonts be so inviolate that no one but a Microsoft engineer can delete them? Why protect so very many totally weird language fonts, ESPECIALLY since I paid good money to buy the ENGLISH version of Windows 7 Pro 64 bit?  If I want the Sanskrit version, I'll go buy it! I too REALLY resent having to scroll down and down through so many fonts to get to the very few I want to generally use.