getting rid of CY and CE fonts

[henryn]

Folks:

MacOS 10.4.7
Office 2004 fully updated

How do I get rid of the CY and CE fonts in my Word font menu?

I travel light by removing all but essential fonts from my machine. But no
matter what I do, I have "Courier CE", "Geneva CE", "Helvetica CE" "Lucida
Grande CE", "Monaco CE", "Times CE, "Lucida Grand CY," "Monaco CY", "Times
CY" occupying about a third of my Word font menus.

No system or add-on font management tool can "see" these CE and CY fonts,
nor can I find them by examining directly the folders (directories) where
fonts are installed. Apparently Word finds CE and CY encodings in some
"normal" fonts and lists them after listing the "normal" non CE and CY
encodings in the font menu. (Why?)

Documentation is scare, but as far as I can tell it is a bad idea to use
these fonts.

I'll never use these fonts, I want to get rid of them, and I should be able
to.

How?

Is there a switch somewhere that tells Word not to look for them or not to
list them?

TIA,

Henry

 

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

Hey Henry:

Leave those ones alone Word wants them, and will put them back in each
time you remove them.

They're used for something to do with one of the office applications, I
think...

Cheers

Folks:

MacOS 10.4.7
Office 2004 fully updated

How do I get rid of the CY and CE fonts in my Word font menu?

I travel light by removing all but essential fonts from my machine. But no
matter what I do, I have "Courier CE", "Geneva CE", "Helvetica CE" "Lucida
Grande CE", "Monaco CE", "Times CE, "Lucida Grand CY," "Monaco CY", "Times
CY" occupying about a third of my Word font menus.

No system or add-on font management tool can "see" these CE and CY fonts,
nor can I find them by examining directly the folders (directories) where
fonts are installed. Apparently Word finds CE and CY encodings in some
"normal" fonts and lists them after listing the "normal" non CE and CY
encodings in the font menu. (Why?)

Documentation is scare, but as far as I can tell it is a bad idea to use
these fonts.

I'll never use these fonts, I want to get rid of them, and I should be able
to.

How?

Is there a switch somewhere that tells Word not to look for them or not to
list them?

TIA,

Henry

--

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. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[henryn]

Hullo John:

Thanks for your response:

Hey Henry:

Leave those ones alone Word wants them, and will put them back in each
time you remove them.

They're used for something to do with one of the office applications, I
think...

I accept that Office applications have some required fonts. Somewhere I've
got notes that explain which ones. I've followed those recommendations, the
number of fonts is neither too big or too quirky, so,OK, no problem on that
account.

Ummm, no, can't be, these fonts I'm trying to be rid of are clearly intended
for people who need Cyrillic (CY) or Central European (CE) characters. No
offense intended to people in that part of the world, but why would these be
obligatory, and not --say-- Swahili or Tagalog character sets? It doesn't
make any sense at all.

Thanks,

Henry

 

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

Dunno, Henry:

Pull them out and find out what doesn't work

I think they have some glyphs in them that Office covets. My suggestion is
"leave 'em", but if you're determined ...

Cheers

Hullo John:

Thanks for your response:



I accept that Office applications have some required fonts. Somewhere I've
got notes that explain which ones. I've followed those recommendations, the
number of fonts is neither too big or too quirky, so,OK, no problem on that
account.

Ummm, no, can't be, these fonts I'm trying to be rid of are clearly intended
for people who need Cyrillic (CY) or Central European (CE) characters. No
offense intended to people in that part of the world, but why would these be
obligatory, and not --say-- Swahili or Tagalog character sets? It doesn't
make any sense at all.

Thanks,

Henry

--

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. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[henryn]

Hullo John:

Thanks for your email:

Dunno, Henry:

Pull them out and find out what doesn't work

I think they have some glyphs in them that Office covets. My suggestion is
"leave 'em", but if you're determined ...

Why would Office covet Cyrillic or Central European glyphs in for a purely
U.S. installation? Never mind.


It appears that Word/Office scans all available fonts and presents at least
two distinct lists of them. The lists appear in font menus:

First, the list of "normal" fonts from A-Z. These correspond to actual font
files so if "Thudpucker Narrow" appears in the first list, I have found I
know if I look in all the places OS X keeps fonts I'll find a font file with
that name.

Following that is the list of CE/CY fonts alphabetized A-Z.

But the CE/CY list does not list names of font files. There are no font
files with names "Courier CE" or "Monaco CY". Near as I can tell, some
"normal" font files include extra CE or CY glyphs. Near as I can tell,
this is a carryover from days before Unicode support, to make CE and CY
glyphs available to people who needed them. Near as I can tell, this is a
workaround that people recommend strongly against using today, because they
are completely non-standard. For example, these characters will not cross
successfully to a PC, according to what I've read.

So, in response to your suggestion that I remove the CE and CY fonts: I
can't.

I guess that Word/Office at some time in the past made these extra encodings
available in the font menus because they were at that point the best
alternative for people who needed CE or CY characters, which made sense
before Unicode support was extensive.

Times have changed. There are now standard and portable ways of accessing
Central European and Cyrillic character sets. We don't need these extra CY
and CE glyphs and the best available evidence is that they shouldn't be
used.

I'm guessing that there was once a mechanism described as a way of making
available extra glyph sets found in otherwise standard fonts. Without know
exactly how it works, I'll call it an "extra flag" in the font
characteristics; when set, it means the font includes at least one extra
encoding.

The Office implementers decided that they would simply list any fonts flying
this flag in an alphabetized secondary list, without offering users a choice
about whether they wanted this or not. I'm guessing that if I designed a
new font --maybe I'll call it "Martian Bold"-- and included a "Polar
Martian" variant with the "extra flag" set, then "Martian Bold" would appear
in the first font list and "Martian Bold PM" would appear in the second
list.

That's my theory. I would be interested in hearing additional information.

Thanks,

Henry

 

[little_creature]

Why would Office covet Cyrillic or Central European glyphs in for a purely
U.S. installation? Never mind.

Because I have the same instalation of Office and I use them. They might be
required to ensure compatibility with PC or whatever. I know in some page
layout SW such as Indesign you can either load certain fonts or not, but
office is more complex than just page layout applicaion... But you mention
you cannot remove them from the menu even using font manager.
That's my guess and I can imagine that they might be redundant for you.
Dunno any clever answer - if you remeove them from all system folders (
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=122011&tstart=0), does it
help? Think they will be created again as mention in previous post.

 

[henryn]

little_creature:

Thanks for your post on this thread:

little_creature at (e-mail address removed) wrote on 10/2/06
12:16 AM:

Because I have the same instalation of Office and I use them.

My recent research seems to indicate that using the CE or CY glyphs is not a
good idea, for example, because such usage is very non-portable. Your
mileage may vary.

They might be
required to ensure compatibility with PC or whatever. I know in some page
layout SW such as Indesign you can either load certain fonts or not, but
office is more complex than just page layout applicaion...

Yes, one does have some more control over fonts in page design programs like
InDesign.

But you mention
you cannot remove them from the menu even using font manager.

That's right. I have not found a method of removing these fonts.

That's my guess and I can imagine that they might be redundant for you.

Yes, thanks, they are completely useless to me, and in my preferred system
font configuration, occupy approximately one-third of my font menu -- a big
burden for fonts I will never use.

Dunno any clever answer - if you remeove them from all system folders (
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=122011&tstart=0), does it
help? Think they will be created again as mention in previous post.

The last time I did this, after I installed MacOS 10.3, I reviewed all the
information I could find, I searched out ALL the fonts locations in system
--including in OS 9 (aka Classic)--and I removed all unnecessary fonts. I
left only fonts required by the System or particular applications. When
possible, I made sure application-mandatory fonts were placed in font
folders maintained by that application -- this was the case for Adobe
Acrobat Reader. All this work resulted in considerably shorter font lists
in all applications. But the CY and CE fonts still showed up, as before, in
Word.

All the evidence so far tells me that fonts marked "CE" and "CY" are NOT
distinct fonts, but --in essence-- extra glyph sets attached to normal
fonts.

Applications have a choice of listing these extra sets or not. Office Apps
do. Adobe InDesign CS 3.0 does not.

Yes, thanks, I saw that article, quite up to date, and I intend to use it to
help me get rid of all non-required fonts for this 10.4 installation.

Thanks,

Henry

 

[little_creature]

Hi Henry,
tx for your post, this gave me thing to think about:

All the evidence so far tells me that fonts marked "CE" and "CY" are NOT
distinct fonts, but --in essence-- extra glyph sets attached to normal
fonts.

I have always assumed that fonts marked "CE" are proper font. I will do a
bit search when I'm not busy. What leads me to think this way is that if you
have installed Arial CE and Arial and remove Arial you can still use Arial
CE as a proper font (this tried on PC).

I think that that "fonts marked "CE" and "CY" are NOT
distinct fonts, but --in essence-- extra glyph sets attached to normal
fonts" may not be general issue, because the font which behave in this way
are MS font, so maybe that they have been done in some special way.

(Such as on PC in PowerPoint I cannot use other font than Arial. All other
system font doesn't use czech accent and are replaced by arial. I have no
idea why - it's genuine MS sytem, genuine Office and genuine MS font marked
in font folder as opentype (however if you then open the font it says
TrueType) and just in PowerPoint. That's what makes me think that it can be
problem of font.)

 

[henryn]

little_creature:

Thanks for your post on this thread:

little_creature at (e-mail address removed) wrote on 10/3/06
2:18 AM:

Hi Henry,
tx for your post, this gave me thing to think about:

I have always assumed that fonts marked "CE" are proper font.

That is what I thought for a long time.

I will do a bit search when I'm not busy.

Several of us will be very surprised if you find them!

What leads me to think this way is that if you
have installed Arial CE and Arial and remove Arial you can still use Arial
CE as a proper font (this tried on PC).

Yes, or that you could remove Arial CE and have Arial to use.

I have an XP system with Office but I know almost nothing about fonts on
Windows.

I think that that "fonts marked "CE" and "CY" are NOT
distinct fonts, but --in essence-- extra glyph sets attached to normal
fonts" may not be general issue, because the font which behave in this way
are MS font, so maybe that they have been done in some special way.

That is a reasonable theory. I do not know enough about fonts internals to
say anything

I tried several different utility programs to look at Mac fonts to find the
CE (or CY) component under my theory. But no tool I used said anything
specific about them.

(Such as on PC in PowerPoint I cannot use other font than Arial. All other
system font doesn't use czech accent and are replaced by arial. I have no
idea why - it's genuine MS sytem, genuine Office and genuine MS font marked
in font folder as opentype (however if you then open the font it says
TrueType) and just in PowerPoint. That's what makes me think that it can be
problem of font.)

Please ask people on the PC -- Powerpoint or PC -- Office group about such
questions.

If you want, contact me privately and we can continue this discussion
off-list.

Thanks,

Henry

(e-mail address removed) remove 'zzz'