Mac OS X 10.5 and fonts installed by Office 2008

[dhiggs]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel

Just thought I would share what I have noticed with fonts installed by the Office 2008 installer.

- Office 2008 installs all it's fonts into \Library\Fonts\Microsoft.

- The following lists fonts installed by Office 2008 that already exist in the system \Library\Fonts folder

Andale Mono
Arial
Arial Black
Arial Narrow
Arial Rounded Bold
Comic Sans MS
Georgia
Impact
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
Wingdings
Wingdings 2
Wingdings 3

- The remaining 108 fonts Office 2008 installs (which I have not listed) are not duplicates of the standard system fonts.

- The installer leaves the Mac OS X versions where they are, but disables them. This is reflected by Font Book, which can be used to view the folder locations of the disabled or enabled fonts.

- The one exception is Wingdings. It does not disable the system version. Font Book shows both as enabled under 'Wingdings' showing two styles called Regular. The microsoft version is TT. The system version is a font suitcase.

- When using Font Book to validate all fonts on the system, it flags the above fonts as having errors. The error reported is only that it is a duplicate font. As the dupicates are not enabled, this is fairly safe.

I am looking to deploy Extensis Universal Type Server and it's recommended I disable any functionality of Font Book.

Therefore it made sense to me to get rid of any fonts that were disabled by Font Book. This would mean making the decision to remove the Office 2008 or Mac OS X fonts as listed above.

I would say the Mac OS X fonts are more important to keep and potentially dangerous if removed from \Library\Fonts. I used Font Book to remove these fonts and retrieved them from the trash to backup somewhere in case of an issue.

In removing the above list of fonts from \Library\Fonts\Microsoft, I haven't encountered any issues with the Office applications in my brief testing. All applications function and don't show any signs of font substitution within the application itself.

Happy to hear from anyone that would like to share any additional information or point out an issue with removing these fonts.

 

[Diane Ross]

Happy to hear from anyone that would like to share any additional information
or point out an issue with removing these fonts.

Font Facts:

Despite the version number, many (if not all) of the MSFT fonts are newer
than the Apple OS ones.

Office 2008 does not need ANY of its fonts to "run." However, various
features of Office 2008 will be broken or display poorly unless you leave
the fonts it installs in place.

Office 2008 relies on up-to-date Unicode versions of fonts that support
ligatures and faces. Its own font set has been updated to provide these
capabilities.

I would caution you not to disable the Chinese/Japanese fonts. These are
required to produce certain special characters.

 

[dhiggs]

Interesting, as I'm finding the opposite as I start looking into this a bit more.

Let's take Arial for example, looking at the Regular style. Font Book reports the system font is a higher version than that installed by Office 2008. Looking at the repertoire, the system font shows a much larger set of character sets than the Office 2008 version installed in \Library\Fonts\Microsoft.

This is the case for 4 others I have looked at and maybe all. Is it possible that Mac OS X 10.5.x now has font versions which are now above those of Office 2008? I'm wondering if the information you have might pertain to Mac OS X 10.4.x

I think i'm getting myself in too deep

 

[Diane Ross]

This is the case for 4 others I have looked at and maybe all. Is it possible
that Mac OS X 10.5.x now has font versions which are now above those of Office
2008? I'm wondering if the information you have might pertain to Mac OS X
10.4.x

I think i'm getting myself in too deep

It is possible things have changed. I would leave your fonts alone and stop
mucking around.

 

[Tim Murray]

It is possible things have changed. I would leave your fonts alone and stop
mucking around.

Sometimes, however, requirements of the publishing situation require one to
dig down to the details and sort things out.