Is it possible to limit length of the list offonts in MS Office 2004 programs?

[phyljohn]

I am using MS Office 2004 on a Mac PPC G3 with system 10.4.11. I have hundreds of fonts on my hard drive but only a few dozen installed in the System/Library, Library/Fonts and User/Library/Fonts folders. At any given time most of these fonts are turned off in Font Book as I use only a few at a time.

The other fonts are in a separate folder on the hard drive and I install them in one of the libraries and activate them with Font Book as needed.

The problem is that when I start any Office program the program takes over 30 seconds whilst it optimizes the font menu and the font menu lists every font on my hard drive. This makes it very awkward to select fonts and I'm sure must use up a lot of memory.

Is there some way to restrict the fonts recognized and listed by Office programs to, preferably, only those that are activated in Font Book, or, at least, to only those installed in one of the font libraries?

 

[John McGhie]

The Font Menu will show you the fonts you have enabled at the time you boot
the computer.

The Font Menu is really not a good way to drive Word. It is far better to
use Styles for formatting.

A Style is simply a named collection of formatting properties. It can
contain a hell of a lot more than just the name of the font.

By using Styles, your formatting ends up being utterly consistent throughout
the whole document, and formatting is more than 100 times faster than
fiddling around with fonts.

So I would strongly encourage you to define a style for each kind of
paragraph you create. Specify your favourite font for each. Then you never
need to think about the Font Menu again!

In Office 2008, you can define Themes which automatically switch your styles
to different font sets. In Word 2004, you do that by creating a different
template for each font set. Attach a different template, update styles, and
instantly switch font sets throughout the entire document.

Cheers

I am using MS Office 2004 on a Mac PPC G3 with system 10.4.11. I have hundreds
of fonts on my hard drive but only a few dozen installed in the
System/Library, Library/Fonts and User/Library/Fonts folders. At any given
time most of these fonts are turned off in Font Book as I use only a few at a
time.

The other fonts are in a separate folder on the hard drive and I install them
in one of the libraries and activate them with Font Book as needed.

The problem is that when I start any Office program the program takes over 30
seconds whilst it optimizes the font menu and the font menu lists every font
on my hard drive. This makes it very awkward to select fonts and I'm sure must
use up a lot of memory.

Is there some way to restrict the fonts recognized and listed by Office
programs to, preferably, only those that are activated in Font Book, or, at
least, to only those installed in one of the font libraries?

--
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Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50

 

[phyljohn]

Thanks for the suggestion but it doesn't solve the problem. It's not just Word that has the long font lists. All the Office programs have these long font lists. The Word/Excel/PowerPoint font list includes fonts that are not "enabled", that is, it includes fonts not in the various libraries, but are located elsewhere on the hard drive. Office searches them out and list them. I would prefer to work with fonts the way I want to and the way other word processors on the Mac work.