Best way to remove extra Microsoft fonts?

[Zack]

Hello,

What is the best way to remove the extra fonts which Microsoft loaded
into my computer when I installed Office 2004, and which fonts can I
safely get rid of? I admit to ignorance of the font management aspects
of Panther, other than a vague awareness that the new font utitilty
(Font book? Font mangler? Font forge? Font-be-gone? sorry, can't
remember the name) was problematic.

Thanks for any pointers!

Zack
Word 2004, OSX 10.3.3

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi Zack,
yes, you can use Font Book to solve basic font-related problems, and you can
also disable or delete fonts according to your wishes. However, among the
many fonts installed by Office 2004, you do NOT want to temper with the
following ones:

Arial
Batang
Gulim
Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro W3
Lucida Grande
MS PMincho
MS Gothic
MS Mincho
MS Pgothic
MT Extra
PmingLiu
Simsun
Symbol
Times New Roman
Verdana
Wingding

This list was posted some time ago by a Microsoft employee, so I assume she
knew what she was talking about.

Michel

 

[Zack]

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.

Is this correct that so long as I keep MS Gothic, there should be no
font reloading issues? And is there any need to keep the other fonts?
(I would in any case keep Arial, Lucida Grande, Symbol, and Times New
Roman).

Thanks,
Zack

 

[Elliott Roper]

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.

Is this correct that so long as I keep MS Gothic, there should be no
font reloading issues? And is there any need to keep the other fonts?
(I would in any case keep Arial, Lucida Grande, Symbol, and Times New
Roman).

That sounds about right. You might also want to check that you kept the
Arial and Times New Roman that came with 2004 in preference to the ones
that came with OS X. The 2004 ones have a much expanded set of Unicode
glyphs, such as nice looking commonly used fractions. And much much
more.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

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:

The list Michel suggested was posted by an MS employee.

This second list is from earlier than that, and is the product of much
diligent experimentation by a poster here, Jeff Wiseman who wrote the
article on the MVP site.

I would go with the first list of fonts to keep, myself.

I would also, if you really want to mess with fonts, consider paying the $5
for this ebook
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/word-1.html
Which has 6 pages on exactly your question including an intro to Font Book,
Apple's utility.

Aren't you the person who just switched to 2004 from Word 5.1? The rest of
the book is also worth the money.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

I agree with Daiya If you are new to Word 2004, I suggest that you
might use it on a daily basis for at least six months before doing anything
at all to its fonts

I would also read the whole of the book she sent you to before fiddling.

I am aware that you are an experienced and competent computer user.
However, OS X software is rather more complex in its interrelationships than
Word 5.1 was It expects all manner of things to be called by the
correct names and located in the correct positions.

Once you know it well, you can of course get away with all sorts of cunning
trickery. But a few users have discovered that if you get it even slightly
wrong, you end up with a highly unstable system that takes months to debug
and fix.

Fonts are a legendary source of trouble. This is one of the reasons
Microsoft keeps three copies on your system The various applications
require certain fonts to be there, and you'll live in crash-city if they're
not

Assuming that your system currently has fewer than about 500 fonts loaded,
optimising the Microsoft fonts might save you 40 MB of disk space. Your
system won't run any quicker. But it may be a lot quicker to crash. You
may get compatibility hell with documents from other sources. And Unicode
may not work right so you will get missing font problems.

This is one area in Microsoft Office administration where errors hurt.
Just a word to the wise...

Cheers

The list Michel suggested was posted by an MS employee.

This second list is from earlier than that, and is the product of much
diligent experimentation by a poster here, Jeff Wiseman who wrote the
article on the MVP site.

I would go with the first list of fonts to keep, myself.

I would also, if you really want to mess with fonts, consider paying the $5
for this ebook
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/word-1.html
Which has 6 pages on exactly your question including an intro to Font Book,
Apple's utility.

Aren't you the person who just switched to 2004 from Word 5.1? The rest of
the book is also worth the money.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Zack]

Once you know it well, you can of course get away with all sorts of cunning
trickery. But a few users have discovered that if you get it even slightly
wrong, you end up with a highly unstable system that takes months to debug
and fix.

Fonts are a legendary source of trouble. This is one of the reasons
Microsoft keeps three copies on your system The various applications
require certain fonts to be there, and you'll live in crash-city if they're
not

Assuming that your system currently has fewer than about 500 fonts loaded,
optimising the Microsoft fonts might save you 40 MB of disk space. Your
system won't run any quicker. But it may be a lot quicker to crash. You
may get compatibility hell with documents from other sources. And Unicode
may not work right so you will get missing font problems.

This is one area in Microsoft Office administration where errors hurt.
Just a word to the wise...

OK, I think I get the message: Don't mess with Microsoft! It's
annoying to see all those fonts I'll never use cluttering up my font
menu, but I'll live with it. My main concern was that Word 2004 seems
a bit sluggish (even though I've turned off the obvious cpu-hogs such
as automatic pagination and status bar) and I thought slimming down the
fonts might help, but I gather from the above messages this is probably
not the case. Incidently, I'm using OSX 10.3.3 on a 1.3Ghz G4 with
1.25 gig of RAM.

Zack

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Zack,

Upgrade to OS X 10.3.9. That should help some.

Otherwise, if you're comparing Office 2004 on OS X to Office 2001 on OS 9,
then yes, the former is slower, but here are some other tips that could
help:

Work in Normal view whenever possible.

Tables: If a table spans multiple pages, break it up a couple of times.
Table cells that span multiple pages can also slow Word down, so you can try
breaking the tables there. If you're doing a large amount of work in a
table, you can try copying and pasting it into a new document and working on
it there until you're ready to paste it back to the original.

Graphics: If you're working with graphics that you don't need to view or
modify you can turn on the "Image Placeholder" preference in Word>
Preferences> View. (Only works for inline graphics.)

Saving and then Quitting and Re-Launching Word occasionally could
also help.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Aaron Shepard]

That's very interesting, John. In that case, one of the best things you
could do to speed up Word would be to turn off journaling on your hard
disk, using the Disk Utility. And Spotlight too, if you're in Tiger.

These are things I'm doing already, and maybe that's the only reason
I'm not having any trouble with responsiveness in Word 2004 -- except
an occasional pause before deleted text disappears. (I'm on a dual
processor G4 tower.) I didn't realize that. Thanks!

Aaron

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hi Zack:

I understand the problem, trust me.

<snip>
I know you know this stuff, and you deliberately oversimplified,
particularly the way that OS X schedules threads.

The bit I liked was your description of the event loop model that Word
and just about everything else uses having moved from a co-operative
process based scheduled OS9 to a pre-emptive thread based scheduler
like we have today in OS X.

The consequence of that for performance, which you touched on only by
example, (word count) is to ensure that the big slug monster event loop
spends most of its time doing useful work, and not fooling about
tidying all the ornaments.

I get excellent responsiveness out of Word 2004 on a 1 GHz 12"
Powerbook with 768MB by flying minimalist.

No status bar, no toolbars ( I need 1 pixel of the formatting palette
customised down to just the style name on screen to work round the
cmd-shift-s misfeature), no scroll bars, nothing.

I run in page view, because I do a lot of reviewing and I need those
balloons, and because life is too short to deal with ugly displays like
normal view.

Everything I do frequently has been mapped to keystroke combos,
everything less frequent I reach via keyboard nav of the main menu bar.

It is definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but while running like that
Word is perfectly snappy. OK, once in a while it will bog itself down
re-displaying a big style change, but there is no reason why you cannot
plough on typing while it fiddles. That's where all this mouse malarkey
is over-rated -- you can't move on till the housekeeper has finished
tidying the coffee table.

Finally, for Zack's original question, something about fonts that has
not yet been mentioned in this thread. If Word ever shows you
'optimising fonts' for more than a couple of seconds at start-up, get
yourself a copy of Font Finagler and run it while Word isn't. OS X can
get its font caches into a KTS (knickers twisted situation) Finagler
sorts it out beautifully. You get 10 free goes before you have to pay.
They go a long way. I'm up to 5 after 18 months.

 

[Elliott Roper]

That's very interesting, John. In that case, one of the best things you
could do to speed up Word would be to turn off journaling on your hard
disk, using the Disk Utility. And Spotlight too, if you're in Tiger.

Nah. Journalling probably speeds your system up. It certainly makes it
more reliable after a power fail. Spotlight indexing is pretty
civilised. Both mds and mdimport readily cede to other threads when
asked. What John's oversimplification neglected to say was that threads
are scheduled by priority which is fiddled with for fairness. mdimport
and mds have been 'niced' way down. They use a bucket of cpu, but only
the leftovers.

These are things I'm doing already, and maybe that's the only reason
I'm not having any trouble with responsiveness in Word 2004 -- except
an occasional pause before deleted text disappears. (I'm on a dual
processor G4 tower.) I didn't realize that. Thanks!

I'm running with journalling and spotlight on, with a machine less than
half the grunt of yours, with no Word sluggishness at all. My trick is
to fly minimalist (see my other post).

 

[Aaron Shepard]

Clive, I'm only testing Tiger so far, while still working on Panther.
Currently I just have Spotlight disabled on all my drives, but when I
actually set up Tiger to work, I intend to use a program called
Spotless to turn it off entirely. Spotless has been getting nice
reviews. To restore basic Find capability, there's another program
called EasyFind that does not index.

I guess I was spoiled by OS 9 not doing anything unless I asked it to.
I don't like to hear my drives being written to without my permission.

Aaron

 

[Aaron Shepard]

Journalling speeding up your system, Elliott? Now, how can a function
that mirrors all hard drive activity possibly speed you up? Reports are
that it causes significant delays when long documents are saved. And I
work with a lot of long documents in Word -- entire books in a single
file.

The only time saved by journalling is speedier recovery after a crash,
because the system doesn't have to check all disks for integrity.
Frankly, I'd rather save time during working and suffer the extra
minute or two after the infrequent crashes.

I suspect that a lot of the complaints about Word's sluggishness are
really caused by Spotlight and journalling. The new edition of my Word
book is almost 150 pages long, and I'm editing it in Word 2004 with
almost no lags at all. (That's after applying the third update. Before
that, it was so bad, I was thinking of switching word processors.)

By the way, I've turned off the equivalent mirroring function in
Windows on my Virtual PC and found that I can run Word on that too with
reasonable speed. I feel sorry for those Mac users who suffer a double
hit from having that function turned on in both operating systems at
once!

Aaron

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Elliott:

You're right: I "did" over-simplify. Alleging that I *understand* this is
very definitely over-stating the case. But I have a partial appreciation of
what's happening under the hood

The post was already too long by at least half I did not want to advise
the user to consider the 255-dimension matrix that one needs to manipulate
in your head when performing system tuning on a multitasking system

People with Phds in the subject entertain themselves by considering Number
of Processors x Number of Resident Processes x Number of Descendant Threads
x Number of User Processes x Number of User Threads all multiplied by 255.
Gets them to sleep at night better than counting sheep...

And Terminal pilots fiddle around with nice in an attempt to get things
"perfect", and along the way, discover that "There are old pilots, and bold
pilots, but there are very few old bold pilots..."

Both Windows and OS X employ a raft of tricks to schedule threads and tasks
in an optimal way. They also have a different take on the "size" of the
time slices they allocate.

Unix was really designed for an almost mainframe-like duty cycle, and hands
out larger time slices less frequently. This suits a system running big
jobs such as batch processes and printing. Windows hands out tiny
time-slices very frequently. This suits a system being used as a desktop
personal computer. It makes the system "seem" really responsive to the
user, but it's not actually getting as much work done because it is spending
a lot of its time task-switching, particularly if the running tasks do not
complete their current operation during the allocated time slice and have to
be "parked".

But the point I really was trying to make was "In OS 9, we learned to leave
applications running, because starting and stopping them fragmented the
memory and produced slow systems and crashes. In OS X, we need to unlearn
that behaviour, because the available power is (loosely) divided between the
running programs, whether they're doing anything or not. And OS X cleans up
its memory when it has nothing else to do: a task happening automatically in
the background that I hope Aaron *doesn't* object to "

Cheers

Hi Zack:

I understand the problem, trust me.

<snip>
I know you know this stuff, and you deliberately oversimplified,
particularly the way that OS X schedules threads.

The bit I liked was your description of the event loop model that Word
and just about everything else uses having moved from a co-operative
process based scheduled OS9 to a pre-emptive thread based scheduler
like we have today in OS X.

The consequence of that for performance, which you touched on only by
example, (word count) is to ensure that the big slug monster event loop
spends most of its time doing useful work, and not fooling about
tidying all the ornaments.

I get excellent responsiveness out of Word 2004 on a 1 GHz 12"
Powerbook with 768MB by flying minimalist.

No status bar, no toolbars ( I need 1 pixel of the formatting palette
customised down to just the style name on screen to work round the
cmd-shift-s misfeature), no scroll bars, nothing.

I run in page view, because I do a lot of reviewing and I need those
balloons, and because life is too short to deal with ugly displays like
normal view.

Everything I do frequently has been mapped to keystroke combos,
everything less frequent I reach via keyboard nav of the main menu bar.

It is definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but while running like that
Word is perfectly snappy. OK, once in a while it will bog itself down
re-displaying a big style change, but there is no reason why you cannot
plough on typing while it fiddles. That's where all this mouse malarkey
is over-rated -- you can't move on till the housekeeper has finished
tidying the coffee table.

Finally, for Zack's original question, something about fonts that has
not yet been mentioned in this thread. If Word ever shows you
'optimising fonts' for more than a couple of seconds at start-up, get
yourself a copy of Font Finagler and run it while Word isn't. OS X can
get its font caches into a KTS (knickers twisted situation) Finagler
sorts it out beautifully. You get 10 free goes before you have to pay.
They go a long way. I'm up to 5 after 18 months.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Elliott Roper]

Journalling speeding up your system, Elliott? Now, how can a function
that mirrors all hard drive activity possibly speed you up? Reports are
that it causes significant delays when long documents are saved. And I
work with a lot of long documents in Word -- entire books in a single
file.

It is faster to write the journal to pre-allocated contiguous lump of
disk than to splatter it to your file(s) all over the disk. The system
catches up in its own time without having you wait.

The only time saved by journalling is speedier recovery after a crash,
because the system doesn't have to check all disks for integrity.
Frankly, I'd rather save time during working and suffer the extra
minute or two after the infrequent crashes.

It ain't just 'speedier'. It's *at all*. Unix flushes buffers lazily.
Disk writes complete before the stuff is actually written to disk. With
journalling on the flushes are frequent and system wide. The OS will
flush the last of the journal as the power fades away. Without the
journal, you risk losing several seconds or minutes or more work,
depending on the application. Without journalling you also run the risk
of your file structure getting out of whack. fsck (automatic at
re-start) normally fixes it, but journalling practically guarantees it
will get fixed with fsck on restart.

Journalling is like ECC memory. Why ride without a crash helmet? You
can survive an error, but it is less likely. If you got it. Use it.

I suspect that a lot of the complaints about Word's sluggishness are
really caused by Spotlight and journalling. The new edition of my Word
book is almost 150 pages long, and I'm editing it in Word 2004 with
almost no lags at all. (That's after applying the third update. Before
that, it was so bad, I was thinking of switching word processors.)

Suspect all you like. I already gave you evidence of Word 2004 working
well with spotlight and journalling on, and reasons why Spotlight and
its little mates should not affect interactive applications very much
if at all.
If you choose to 'suspect' something in the face of contrary evidence
then....

 

[Aaron Shepard]

Thanks for the explanation of journaling, Elliott. I might turn that on
and test it for myself.

As for Spotlight, I've read too many reports of Mac slowdowns --
including for large files in both Word and Eudora, another main app of
mine -- to pay much attention to why Spotlight "should not" affect such
apps. Microsoft itself has promised to update Word to make it more
compatible with Spotlight but has so far failed to deliver.

Aaron

 

[Elliott Roper]

Thanks for the explanation of journaling, Elliott. I might turn that on
and test it for myself.

As for Spotlight, I've read too many reports of Mac slowdowns --
including for large files in both Word and Eudora, another main app of
mine -- to pay much attention to why Spotlight "should not" affect such
apps. Microsoft itself has promised to update Word to make it more
compatible with Spotlight but has so far failed to deliver.

I believe the intention is to permit Spotlight indexing of larger Word
documents. Currently it seems to give up after the first 200KB or so.
It is instructive to search a .doc with Spotlight or Finder's
spotlightish search and a .pdf made from the same .doc

I am no fan of Spotlight (yet). It frequently fails to index things as
you would expect, and is sometimes dreadfully slow to spot even a
filename in a very narrow set of folders. And you have to run it from
the command line to search for regexps. But when it works, it is not
bad at all.

If you run "top -us5 10" from the terminal (to get the top 10 cpu
guzzlers reported on every 5 seconds), you will often see a process
called mds, and another called mdimport munching away at the cpu. They
are Spotlight's index fixer-uppers. While that is going on, give Word a
kicking. Is it really very much slower? You will see those babies cede
cpu to Word with barely a murmur.

Indeed, in different circumstances you may see Word taking 15% of the
cpu when it is utterly unmolested. It too will give that back if
something else wants it. Interestingly, Word 2004 guzzles much less
than v.X when idle. Here it is about 2% with a document open, on
screen, and not being edited.

That is actually a good demonstration of how Mac OS X, and most modern
unixes have left behind the early unix one-second-at-a-time scheduling
for compute bound processes that John McGhie alluded to earlier in this
thread.

Incidentally, if you watch the numbers in brackets just before pageouts
and pageins in the 'top' display I mentioned above, you get a good idea
of whether you need more memory or are running too many processes at
once. Pageins bracketed number being non-zero when you first start a
program is ok, but if you have a large number of pageouts, and the
number in brackets is frquently non-zero, you need more memory. You
will see your li'l Macca turn to molasses while that is going on. What
is happening is that the least recently used memory associated with one
of the programs you have running is being chucked out to the swap file
on disk to make room for what you are doing. If later you want to run
that again, you will see pageins increasing as the system realises its
mistake and drags it back in. If what you are doing also involves
getting new data off disk, the fight for control of the disk heads
turns into a right tizz. It is like watching the waiters fight each
other while you wait for your meal. You can think of pageouts as being
made to wait in the lobby, holding your knife, fork and tablecloth,
while they prepare your dessert and re-use your table for somebody
else.

I better stop this rant before the imagery gets too colourful.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Aaron:

Yep: I am with Elliot on Journaling It's like House Insurance: you
never notice it unless you need it! And like insurance, it is far far
better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it...

When I turned it on, I simply didn't notice that it was there. File Vault
is another matter: I run it on the laptop because laptops get stolen, but I
wouldn't run it on a desktop.

BTW: It wasn't "Microsoft" who promised to fix Spotlight, it was Apple.
Apple designed Spotlight so that it doesn't read past the 100 kb mark on
some file types (I.e. It retrieves only the first two blocks of every file).
A peculiar decision...

Generically, I think it's worth mentioning that it is unrealistic to expect
such a promise to be kept inside of two years. The conventional behaviour
of software companies is that they do a new version about every two to three
years. A new level every six months.

The change you are suggesting would be a Level up for Spotlight, or a new
Version for Word. So Apple is to deliver the fix, start expecting it about
now. If Microsoft is to deliver the fix, start thinking in terms of the end
of 2006.

Cheers

Thanks for the explanation of journaling, Elliott. I might turn that on
and test it for myself.

As for Spotlight, I've read too many reports of Mac slowdowns --
including for large files in both Word and Eudora, another main app of
mine -- to pay much attention to why Spotlight "should not" affect such
apps. Microsoft itself has promised to update Word to make it more
compatible with Spotlight but has so far failed to deliver.

Aaron

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Aaron Shepard]

I've turned on journalling and no, I don't notice a difference in
responsiveness. Researching this on the Web last night, it seems that
journalling pre-Panther caused a performance hit of 10% to 25% percent,
but that was fixed before journalling was made the default in Panther.
So, my info was out of date, and thanks to Elliott for the heads up.

By the way, I also further tested the printer metrics option by
printing a document in Word 2003 with that option on and off. Just as
on the Mac, the document printed differently with each setting, using
the same print driver. Also, in each case, the screen display matched
the printed document. So there can't be any question that turning off
"printer metrics" allows Word to control layout with internal metrics,
for both on-screen viewing and printed output.

Aaron

 

[Aaron Shepard]

But there would be no reason to send such a document to be printed on a
different machine with different fonts, right? I mean, if you care how
the document will print on the other machine, you would send a PDF with
fonts embedded, right? And in that case, how could the printer metrics
option possibly be of any use?

Aaron