Windows Protected Fonts

I'm a font fanatic; I have several thousands in my collection (not installed) but I've run across a one of Microsoft's oddities: Microsoft Protected Fonts. Those listed below and others appear in my installed Windows Fonts. They can't be cut even
with font manager programs. Why would MS prevent deleting these weird typefaces? ellenc

Those typefaces may seem weird to you but in some countries like Korea they are core system fonts used by Windows itself. All such fonts are protected, even if they are not used in a specific locale. I suppose that Microsoft could have set the protected fonts according to locale but that would be complex, not always appropriate, and save only a trivial amount of disk space.

And if you really must delete these fonts any admin level user can do this with the correct procedure. But you had better know what you are doing. I will not describe the procedure.

I believe that the context menu is not aware of which fonts are protected. The delete would probably fail. I don't wish to try this.

@ellenc There's a (longish) thread about this here: Removing foreign language fonts - Microsoft Community

Personally one of the first things I do after a clean install in Win7, Wn8 or Win10 is to delete all the non-Latin fonts. There are a lot of them and they waste several hundred megabytes.

The link above has a batch file for doing the whole lot from the command prompt. The individual steps are to use 'takeown /f <filename>' to transfer ownership from 'TrustedInstaller' to yourself. Having done that you give yourself or Administrators Full Control with 'icacls <filename> /grant administrators:F /t'
Then you can remove them from the command-line or from within a font manager. The difficult bit is matching the font name to the shortish file name.

I've never noticed any problems after doing this.

bob

Thanks ever so much to all for taking the time to give valuable info. ellenc