Best way to remove extra Microsoft fonts?

[Jeff Wiseman]

I know I'm coming into this thread kinda late but FWIW...

Thanks for the response. I've been poking around on the MVP site, and
found an article there about the Office font reloading issue
<http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/WhyFontsKeepLoading.htm> which
states, if I'm reading it correctly, that the only fonts one needs to
keep are:
* Batang.ttf
* Gulim.ttf
* MS Gothic.ttf
* MS Mincho.ttf
* MS PGothic.ttf
* MS PMincho.ttf
* PMingLiU.ttf
* SimSun.ttf

Furthermore, there is an addendum at the tail of the article which
states (again, if I'm reading this correctly), that the only font one
needs to keep is MS Gothic.

Bear in mind that that article was dealing specifically with Word
only. I know that for a fact, Powerpoint required one of those
fonts (I forget which, but I'm pretty sure is was NOT the one
that controlled the reloading) in order to just run. I did no
experimenting with Excel or PowerPoint. The issue was that if you
wanted to eliminate the reloading problem when running Word, You
HAD to have that one font (which I believe is MS PGothic.ttf and
not MS Gothic.ttf as you mentioned above).

Other problems likely exist.

The reason I gave the original list is that all of those .ttf
fonts were misbehaving in OS 10.3.8's font book utility (and
possibly the OS's font environment as well). They can
mysteriously disappear from the font book lists as though they
had been deleted even though they are still present in the
libraries thus requiring a resetting of the ATS system for that
user. Because of these problems, I originally had some trouble
finding out which of the fonts was causing the reloading issue so
I listed them all.

Is this correct that so long as I keep MS Gothic, there should be no
font reloading issues?

I believe so as long as you are only running Word. I have tested
this with ONLY the MS PGothic present and the reloading doesn't
occur. I've not really tested it with other Office 2004
applications. The fact that it is the MS PGothic font that's the
culprit for reloading came from a Microsoft design level document.

And is there any need to keep the other fonts?
(I would in any case keep Arial, Lucida Grande, Symbol, and Times New
Roman).

As I said before, other problems may exist with other Office
applications--others may help you here better than I. Note that
the Microsoft fonts that duplicate the ones shipped with Apple
are probably preferrable to keep when resolving the duplicates.

I will add here that I have removed all of the Office loaded
Asian .ttf fonts (except the MS PGothic.ttf) from my font library
and running Word seems to be fine. But again, I am a light user
of Word and I rarely use Excel and PowerPoint on my system. I
have removed the Apple duplicates of the Microsoft fonts
preferring to use the MS versions for consistency. I have also
done all this by manually removing them from the libraries and
not using the Font Book utility since it was so unstable whenever
I tried to use it on any of the .ttf files (it seemed to handle
the other Office font types just fine though as I recall).

Hope this helps some.

 

[Clive Huggan]

I know I'm coming into this thread kinda late but FWIW...




Bear in mind that that article was dealing specifically with Word
only. I know that for a fact, Powerpoint required one of those
fonts (I forget which, but I'm pretty sure is was NOT the one
that controlled the reloading) in order to just run. I did no
experimenting with Excel or PowerPoint. The issue was that if you
wanted to eliminate the reloading problem when running Word, You
HAD to have that one font (which I believe is MS PGothic.ttf and
not MS Gothic.ttf as you mentioned above).

Other problems likely exist.

The reason I gave the original list is that all of those .ttf
fonts were misbehaving in OS 10.3.8's font book utility (and
possibly the OS's font environment as well). They can
mysteriously disappear from the font book lists as though they
had been deleted even though they are still present in the
libraries thus requiring a resetting of the ATS system for that
user. Because of these problems, I originally had some trouble
finding out which of the fonts was causing the reloading issue so
I listed them all.




I believe so as long as you are only running Word. I have tested
this with ONLY the MS PGothic present and the reloading doesn't
occur. I've not really tested it with other Office 2004
applications. The fact that it is the MS PGothic font that's the
culprit for reloading came from a Microsoft design level document.




As I said before, other problems may exist with other Office
applications--others may help you here better than I. Note that
the Microsoft fonts that duplicate the ones shipped with Apple
are probably preferrable to keep when resolving the duplicates.

I will add here that I have removed all of the Office loaded
Asian .ttf fonts (except the MS PGothic.ttf) from my font library
and running Word seems to be fine. But again, I am a light user
of Word and I rarely use Excel and PowerPoint on my system. I
have removed the Apple duplicates of the Microsoft fonts
preferring to use the MS versions for consistency. I have also
done all this by manually removing them from the libraries and
not using the Font Book utility since it was so unstable whenever
I tried to use it on any of the .ttf files (it seemed to handle
the other Office font types just fine though as I recall).

Hope this helps some.

Thank you for putting this clarification on the record, Jeff.

For me personally, I infer a take-home message from this thread and other
discussions: "It's not worth the slight advantage to run the risks". I'm
continuing to leave the installed fonts alone...

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
============

 

[RobertB.]

This was such a good idea that nearly all companies that make software for
Mac OS X or Windows use this design. Some brave companies try to produce
software with the more modern "multi-threaded" design. In that design, the
application is divided up into many little pieces, each of which operates as
if it were an independent program. Making such software is seriously
difficult. You have to do the same amount of work needed to "write one
program", but do it maybe 30 times over, to write 30 different pieces.
Worse: you get the same chance of having a bug multiplied by 30. You get
30 times the testing problems. 30 times the debugging problems. And a
whole new range of "timing" problems along the lines of "If I want to work
on this part of a document, how do I know that the various other threads
have completed their work? Can I rely on this text not being changed while
I am trying to work on it?" The problem is so great that I am not aware of
any multi-threaded application of any considerable size that has succeeded
commercially on personal computers yet. There are some coming: the
Government buys them. With our money... Nobody else can afford them!

John, you're not snowing us here are you? You saying that no native OS X
apps are multithreaded? Not Safari or Mail? Not the latest BB Edit or
Text Wrangler? None of the Adobe applications? They're all stuck in the
days of DOS 5? In the days of multiprocessors and GB of RAM and Linux, I
find this claim very disturbing. Word + Office I can understand.
Although I must say I've never found MS Word to be *that* slow on my 800
MHz widescreen iMac. It's pretty fast unless you're doing a few thousand
search/replace operations on a big file. It does crash periodically,
however. But that's just something Word does.

r.

 

[Elliott Roper]

John, you're not snowing us here are you? You saying that no native OS X
apps are multithreaded? Not Safari or Mail? Not the latest BB Edit or
Text Wrangler? None of the Adobe applications? They're all stuck in the
days of DOS 5? In the days of multiprocessors and GB of RAM and Linux, I
find this claim very disturbing. Word + Office I can understand.
Although I must say I've never found MS Word to be *that* slow on my 800
MHz widescreen iMac. It's pretty fast unless you're doing a few thousand
search/replace operations on a big file. It does crash periodically,
however. But that's just something Word does.

Heh! He *was* oversimplifying a bit wasn't he?
If you run top, you will see 'Microsoft' with 6 threads.
I think his point was that a lot of old-time biggies are stuck in a
single event loop design, where, like it not, the bulk of the
application is dispatched from. In the right hands, event loops are not
that jerky, and can get quite a lot of work done efficiently. To do so,
they'd have to make themselves into a little OS inside themselves. I
don't buy the "30 times debugging problems" argument. In many ways a
good threaded design is easier to debug. Each thread is simple, and the
dispatch and synchronisation code is handed to you on a plate, already
debugged, courtesy of the OS. His argument makes sense when planning a
threaded version starting from a monolithic event loop and face
untangling the spaghetti into threads scheduled by the OS. It would
look like a lot of work for little gain at first.

There are plenty of big multi-threaded apps out there. Apache used to
fork off sub-processes like crazy. Now it creates threads. iTunes is
running here with 15, Thoth (an old old Carbon newsreader I'm typing
this drivel into) has 16. Top tells me there are 102 processes and 379
threads being dispatched on this little PowerBook right now.

Of course, on the other hand, you can use multi-threaded Mail to
illustrate John's point beautifully. Set your key repeat rate as fast
as possible and scroll down your mailbox list panel. Watch the pretty
'clock' things fire off in parallel, and stop scrolling. Inspect the
mail box where you stop. Do you see any foreign messages in the list?
(It used to bug me heaps, but it looks like it is fixed now in 2.0.5
(746/746.2) )

I'll bet that most of "Microsoft's" threads are the result of Carbon
library APIs and Word wouldn't know what a thread was if it jumped up
and bit it on the bum. Dreamweaver looks about the same. I'd try a few
more, but my swap file is in danger of eating all my free disk.