Too many fonts for Word. Help!

[Elliott Roper]

Okay, I'm a designer and I have a LOT of fonts. Every program loads up fine,
EXCEPT for MS Word X.

It stays stuck on "Optimizing Font Performance" for about 5 mintues before
it opens, then it seems to have eaten away at my RAM, because it often times
crashes shortly after opening. My system is kinda old now and not as
powerful as it once was, but, as I said, this is the only problem I'm
having. Everything else loads fast and works fine.

The only font I'm ever going to use in Word is probably Times. Is there
anyway I can limit the number of fonts that Word uses? Or just turn of the
"Optimizing Font Menu" thing.

Thank you VERY much for your help. It's appreciated.

have you got Panther?
If yes, then Font Book is what you need.
Word is no great respecter of fontbook collections. You have to disable
the fonts in the collection (that's in Font Book preferences) and not
just the collection.
A well behaved Panther application would instantly disable the fonts.
With Word, you have to quit it and start again. You can use that
misfeature to your advantage, by immediately enabling the fonts again,
so you have them available to you in Illustrator while Word stays open
on its frugal font diet.

Spending 5 minutes optimizing fonts is a bit wrong, no matter how many
you have. If Word then crashes, I'd suspect one or more of your fonts
to be unwell. I only have 200 fonts active, but 5 seconds of Splash
screen is all I ever see. Just for fun, after quitting Word, I trashed
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (10)
and it made a fresh one in 6 seconds.
You might give that a go.
Another speed up is to turn off wysiwyg font list in Word Prefs
To check for broken fonts, use Font Book to disable all your fonts 1/2
of all the unchecked ones at a time. Even if you have 2048 fonts, it
will only take 11 attempts to find the bad one.
There are quite a few font checker utilities out there. I don't have
any experience with any of them though.

Word is *feeble* in the way it falls over instead of warning you that a
font is unloved. One of my pet hates. It is also far pickier than
anything else, so it is quite useful as a bad font detector. It is a
pity it can't be bothered to say which one was bad.

 

[Ray Dillon]

Okay, I'm a designer and I have a LOT of fonts. Every program loads up fine,
EXCEPT for MS Word X.

It stays stuck on "Optimizing Font Performance" for about 5 mintues before
it opens, then it seems to have eaten away at my RAM, because it often times
crashes shortly after opening. My system is kinda old now and not as
powerful as it once was, but, as I said, this is the only problem I'm
having. Everything else loads fast and works fine.

The only font I'm ever going to use in Word is probably Times. Is there
anyway I can limit the number of fonts that Word uses? Or just turn of the
"Optimizing Font Menu" thing.

Thank you VERY much for your help. It's appreciated.

-Ray Dillon