Protected system fonts

cretaceous said:

Microsoft make too many decisions on what they think is "best" and take control away from the user
- this font issue appears to be driven by a poor bit of programming logic

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By the application that is displaying the fonts it should not be, yes.

other changes are driven by "hey guys this is new, nobody else does it like this, lets change it and lets ignore the users - they don't matter - we're designing softaware for the 21st century - they're just retards "

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Zero changes have been made in Windows using that philosophy. Everything Microsoft has changed has first gone though extensive user trials/testing.

so it's not Microsoft's fault - brilliant
its the programme maker's fault - I see - so Adobe should have changed Photoshop to not show the fonts that were not there before

now then.. "change that everyone likes because we say so":
the ribbon and the orb (I know its not W7 but its MS)?
not being able to arrange thumbnails in arbitrary order in a folder?
removal of 'up button' in folder view?

believe me I used to do usability and user interface design for advanced websites 10 years ago so I do have experience
put things where users expect to find them
do not remove things arbitrarily

of course they test it - they just dont give pepople who dont like it, an option to switch it off - which should be the easiset thing to do

cretaceous said:

Nil Einne - are you being a troll?
have you read the rest of this thread?

it's seeing the unwanted fonts appear in other program menus that is annoying

I'm a professional designer, I don't want to see fonts I have not installed in my menus
I couldn't care less about the disk space

Microsoft make too many decisions on what they think is "best" and take control away from the user
- this font issue appears to be driven by a poor bit of programming logic

other changes are driven by "hey guys this is new, nobody else does it like this, lets change it and lets ignore the users - they don't matter - we're designing softaware for the 21st century - they're just retards "

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I skimmed through the thread. I didn't see any mentioned that the option to hide fonts based on language settings was on, but the fonts were still showing up in unwanted places. For people who have turned the option on but it's still happening I can see some validity in their complaint. For people who did not turn it on and are complaining then frankly your last comment applies to these people IMHO.

Also whether you care about the disk space is somewhat irrelevant. I didn't say everyone cares about the disk space. But faithless did say:

So, I repeat the question. Why is it so insistently imperative that I MUST have - at 31Mb hard disk usage

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If someone does make a complaint about 31mb of disk space usage in this day and era, particular on Windows which is hardly very conservative with disk space usage and has load and loads of things most people will never need, then I feel I'm entilted to point out the complaint is a little silly, to say the least.

Edit: Actually I just noticed this bit:

I can assure you that the fonts show up as faded in the Font folder and yet still turn up as an option for text formatting in emails.

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Which is basically the same thing. But it's still not clear that everyone who is complaining has ensured they either disabled the fonts individually OR made Windows automatically hide fonts based on language settings.

cretaceous said:

so it's not Microsoft's fault - brilliant
its the programme maker's fault - I see - so Adobe should have changed Photoshop to not show the fonts that were not there before
<snipped>

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Adobe could have changed their program to obey the new Windows font manager - hide font option. Of course this is a new option, so it's not unresonable it doesn't yet. Perhaps CS5 will. In any case, many Adobe products already manage this by themselves in a different way. I just tested and confirmed that InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator CS4 sort by font type, i.e. the non latin fonts are sorted seperately and below the latin fonts and symbols (and from memory they have done so for a while), therefore unless you want some but not all non latin fonts, this isn't really an issue (and from the sound of this, people were complaining because they didn't want any non latin fonts). Well unless for some odd reason you're so paranoid that even seeing the fonts causes you problems. Forgot to mention, for Acrobat however, the fonts are only sorted font format which doesn't really help. Also I haven't looked at the options, there may be something for most Adobe programs that can help.

Incidentally, these fonts have been there for a while. Not installed by default perhaps, but many choose to install them (including I suspect many OEMs). In fact from memory Office may have installed them by default. And on a related note, I read something a few hours ago, but lazy to find the link, that with MS Office 2004 for Mac OS X, certain fonts including several non latin ones (like MingLiu) were considered required system fonts for Office and MS strongly discouraged their installation and would not guarantee Office would work if they were missing. I would expect something similar for Windows versions.

Of course they may not have been protected and could be uninstalled, but it's clearly not something new that MS has considered some fonts including non-latin ones compulsory (as you seemed to suggest). And therefore there's been a good reason why software manufacturers could have considered ways to resolve the issue. The real flaw in MS's philosphy has surely been their failure to have any real font manager until recently (even the current one is far from perfect) meaning that software manufacturers have had to do something themselves, rather then just following the MS font manager which would be the much more sensible option.

The Outlook problem is a more valid issue and one that is MS's fault. I would expect MS would resolve this in Office 2010 but don't know for sure.

of course they test it - they just dont give pepople who dont like it, an option to switch it off - which should be the easiset thing to do

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I think it's clear MS's decision has nothing to do with programming difficulty. It's clearly a concious decision on their part. You may not agree with that decision, as you are entilted to but ultimately if you use their OS, it's their decision. The decision to include a font manager is surely to try and help resolve this, although as I said above, it's a bit late.

Edit: Just remembered I'm not even so sure on the protected bit. Part of the reason I came here was because I was trying to replace some XP fonts with newer versions. One of the fonts I was having problems with was Mingliu even though I use English windows (I don't understand any non latin language or alphabet in any case) and I closed most programs (did leave some background programs running). I did eventually replace it, as I did with every font I was trying including stuff like Arial, Microsoft Sans Serif, SegoeUI, Tahoma and Times New Roman but for some reason it did take quite a bit of work similar to the other more integral fonts (like Tahoma and Marlett) which makes me wonder if XP did offer some protection for MingLiu if installed as well. (Although there's no backup in the DLL cache unlike with Tahoma for example.)

faithless said:

I don't have the ability to switch it off; nowhere so far as I have found does Microsoft trouble to tell me WHY it must remain available at all times, whatever my wishes might be. It's just another Mysterious Microsoft fait accompli.

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Did you try asking Microsoft? Or searching? I did the later and quickly got an answer of sorts (or multiple answers). An answer which was more or less what I was expecting I should add (it was the obvious answer).

Removing foreign language fonts.

As may be obvious, that also has some stuff which may be helpful for those here trying to remove fonts. I should also add that if i understand it correctly, only programs which come with Windows generally follow the font manager/hide fonts at the current time. Since it's a new to Windows 7 this isn't that surprising I guess and I apologise for any confusion my suggestion may have caused (although I still believe ensuring you have hidden fonts you don't want to display is an important first step and something which should generally be mentioned).

I admit, although I used Vista, I wasn't originally aware the font manager wasn't part of Vista (since I never had great use for it nor do I play around with fonts to such a level) but did become aware of it in Windows 7 around the time I found this post (well they were related) that's partially why I didn't realise the option would fairly useless at the current time.

Anyway, the best explaination from there:

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.

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You may or may not agree with this, (in case it's not clear, I by and large do) this clearly isn't the place for such a debate and I'm not interested in such a debate. However with the increasing use of unicode, globalisation and demands from non latin alphabet markets, this is the way the world is moving and people are expecting that applications can display non latin characters by default, and plenty of people prefer that even if they don't understand the characters.

Not all may go so far as to make it so difficult to remove the fonts, although maintaining a minimum and consistent set of things, including fonts that people can always rely on being there is the way much of the world is moving now for compatibility, easy of development, reducing testing requirements and other similar reasons. Again, you may not agree with this and I'm not saying you have to, but it's the way the world is moving, not just MS (even Adobe products install certain non latin fonts by default now I believe).

Nil, I'm not sure you get it.

Most of us - the enormous majority of us - want to be able to use software, including operating systems, without having to trawl the internet for hours, searching blogs and forums and manufacturer's support pages in order to find out that you can't actually do something as relatively trivial as decide what fonts are and are not kept on our own computer.

Clearly, a graphically based operating system relies on the availability of certain fonts simply to be able to communicate to the user. That is trite.

What is completely unnecessary is that the operating system (let alone program software like office) is unable to do without language fonts that the user will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, need. I can't read Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and so forth, and I have no intention of learning. Even if things were different, I could always instal fonts that are required - should I be seized by an irresistible urge to learn Mandarin.

· Therefore, not being privy to the inner (and rather baffling) workings of the Microsoft coders' brains, the Microsoft customer sees a font menu encrusted by unuseable fonts, and thinks - yeah, MingLiu, I'll never need that, I'll delete it.
· Can't do that.
· That's ridiculous - check google for what the problem is.
· Oh right. Switch off the unwanted fonts.
· Doesn't work. Well, why not? Oh, it's the third party software's fault. That's alright then. Clearly a better solution to the problem, for all Microsoft's billions of customers, is for it to come up with a device whereby the customer can't actually get rid of useless fonts but imposes niggling annoyances on all those customers except those who can afford to pay £1000s to upgrade their software to a new version that falls in with Microsoft's font lunacy.
· Is there nothing else I can do? Really? Let's check google.
· Aha! It's possible to delete fonts by taking ownership - some ridiculously fiddly and lengthy process that again, is protecting useless fonts which the operating system can perfectly well do without. (Instead of, say, a single option to 'Remove all fonts for writing systems other than the one for the language set when Windows was installed'.) Sigh. Let's do it.
[60 minutes later]
· Jesus H Christ on a bicycle! there are still half a dozen useless fonts that I can't get rid of. That 60 minutes then, not to mention all the time I spent earlier, ever since getting annoyed by useless fonts turning up in all the software font menus, is wasted, because if I can't get rid of ALL the useless fonts the entire exercise seems to be pointless.

Frankly, anyone who thinks its reasonable to treat customers this way is - no offence - clueless. If anyone had to go through crap like this to change channels on a radio or change the display characteristics of a TV channel they'd go ballistic.

Anyway, just what is so critical about MingLiu (and the other half-dozen) that it must be available in English-language versions of Windows? Doesn't that strike you as a teeny bit absurd, as opposed to - for example - having the little square boxes that are mentioned, together with a MsgBox pop up and say "Windows cannot display this font - but it's on your original Windows DVD Rom. Insert now and click 'Install' to view the text as intended." At what point was the decision made 'Yeah, you know, we've decided the best thing to do is make it literally impossible for English-language users to get rid of these weird pictograph-based Asian and squiggly middle-eastern fonts. It really is the top option of all those available, far better than the idea that the user can install the fonts he finds necessary as and when he so chooses'? It could even be that the fonts are in the System Directory (in a different folder, 'Resources' perhaps) so that they can be installed into the Fonts folder immediately. (See, I'm not that worried about hard disk space...)

Given that the need to swiftly install one of that sort of font will happen, like, 1 in every 100,000,000 times that Windows is used by an English speaking customer, as opposed to the 100% of times that unuseable fonts will crud up a font menu in a program that the Microsoft customer cannot afford to upgrade, right now.

And yes, I went everywhere looking. And even from Microsoft MVP type people, nobody realised that you couldn't switch the fonts off. They all gave the same answer as the guy who provided the second answer in the thread to which you linked:
" am not sure what fonts you are referring to, however in order to remove fonts from your system:

- Click Start Orb > type fonts into the searchbox
- Click fonts in search results above
- Highlight the font(s) you would like to delete and simply hit delete key
- Confirm deleting from system"
This is a little frustrating when I've already found out that that doesn't work. I'm not a moron (though I accept some people who post questions can be mistaken for such) and if it was easy to do (I've been using Windows since version 3.0, and used MS-Dos before that, Microsoft Word since before it was a graphical interface - remember 'Transfer-Save'? so this is not some teenage tantrum, but a groan of despair from someone about as familiar as you can be with computers without being involved in the business) I would have discovered it already.

It's not new to Windows 7, by the way, there was the same problem in Vista.

I don't see why we shouldn't have a debate here about whether Microsoft's decisions are good decisions...?

Finally, nothing said by you or Microsoft has explained why it has decided that we MUST have this language flexibility, at whatever cost to the customer, rather than giving us the power to OPT for it, if we choose.

The only place where I'm likely to suddenly be presented with a shedload of text in a language my computer can't display is a) spam, or b) a result on a Google search return page. Since a) I don't want spam and b) if I can't read the language I'm not going to click through to that page from Google, what advantage am I getting from the current policy?

I wouldn't mind betting that this is all about content providers, again (see thread about changes to WMP12). Microsoft wants to assure advertisers in Taiwan and Korea that their adverts are going to display correctly in MSIE, even if the user is in England and doesn't understand the first bloody pictograph.

Faithless,

Ive been following this thread for awile now, enough is enough.

Remove the fonts from this registry key and they'll instantly disappear from the Fonts Manager and the fonts folder and be completely removed upon restart: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts

I can even write a tool that uses the RemoveFontResourceEx Function (Windows) API for removing them if deleting them from that key somehow fails but seriously, out of a million things you could be doing with your machine, no offence but your wasting your time customizing and arguing with others over fonts...

Steven

This removes the font from being displayed in font lists of other software but the file is still in C:\Windows\Fonts.

Windows Explorer no longer shows the file, even with "Show Hidden Files" enabled and "Hide protected operating system files" disabled.

FreeCommander (and Norton Commander for DOS) shows the files but can't delete them.

It still looks as if the only way to remove the file entirely is to delete the reg entry as above and then remove the file using the Ubuntu boot disk. (See my posts 12-12-2009, 12-16-2009)

agbneill said:

This removes the font from being displayed in font lists of other software but the file is still in C:\Windows\Fonts.

Windows Explorer no longer shows the file, even with "Show Hidden Files" enabled and "Hide protected operating system files" disabled.

FreeCommander (and Norton Commander for DOS) shows the files but can't delete them.

It still looks as if the only way to remove the file entirely is to delete the reg entry as above and then remove the file using the Ubuntu boot disk. (See my posts 12-12-2009, 12-16-2009)

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You already told everyone physically deleting these fonts would screw up your system and make it unstable, Why is it so god-dammed important you save 12k of disk place on a font the system cant even use anymore??

yes the reg edit does it for me - works well
thanks dmex
(did you have to wait so long to put us out of our misery?)
this reg edit process to kill the fonts is not widely discoverable on internet
I did many searches prior ot this...

cretaceous said:

yes the reg edit does it for me - works well
thanks dmex

(did you have to wait so long to put us out of our misery?)

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Im sorry, faithless's ranting about something as small as fonts was just too damm funny and I couldn't help myself

this reg edit process to kill the fonts is not widely discoverable on internet
I did many searches prior ot this...

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I tried searching it too and didn't find anything so I searched the MSDN for how to register fonts and sure enough MSDN had the registry keys and API's required to register or unregister them.

Shawn has updated his tutorial with this information, hopefully it will be easier for people to find: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1076-fonts-delete.html

dmex: "You already told everyone physically deleting these fonts would screw up your system and make it unstable, Why is it so god-dammed important you save 12k of disk place on a font the system cant even use anymore??"

(1) Screwed-up system ... I accidently removed Segoe which is the default font for menus, dialog boxes, etc.
(2) Foreign language fonts are about 280 MB, a lot or not depends on how big your hard drive is.

dmex said:

Im sorry, faithless's ranting about something as small as fonts was just too damm funny and I couldn't help myself

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Hopefully I can return the favour someday.

Perhaps I can start by giving you some hints on how to read and understand English. My rant was not about 'something as small as fonts', as I should have thought was clear to most readers, but about 'Microsoft's failure to put the customer at the centre of its thinking'. The font installation problem is the symptom, not the illness.

Still, as long as you've had a good chuckle, eh?

I tried searching it too and didn't find anything so I searched the MSDN for how to register fonts and sure enough MSDN had the registry keys and API's required to register or unregister them.

Shawn has updated his tutorial with this information, hopefully it will be easier for people to find: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1076-fonts-delete.html

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I will rush to check it out.

I feel the pain, daily

I completely agree with 'Faithless." To the ASS that was "playing" with him.. IT IS F'IN IRRITATING.
MS makes it difficult as possible to delete dozens of worthless fonts which clog up the menus of applications, forcing us users to scroll though all those font names every time we want write a letter in WORD.