Managing Vista's Fonts: How To Get Rid of the Fonts You Don't Use

Managing Vista's Fonts: How To Get Rid of the Fonts You  Don't Use
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Vista Font Management

Vista comes populated with many types of fonts. After reading this article you’ll be able to quickly and efficiently rid your system and yourself of fonts you don’t use and put them away until you need them. Some are very useful, with ClearType to OpenType typefaces drawing the most attention and admiration by Vista users. Others clutter your font list with types you will never use. After taking a look at your Vista computer’s fonts you might be wondering how to rid your system of many of the fonts that don’t look like much in English.

Microsoft has included many fonts with Vista that you’re probably wondering about keeping after taking a quick look at a few of the weird and exotic looking scripts populating your Vista operating system. Fonts like DaunPehn, Nyala, and Gisha, and about a dozen or so others you’ll find existing on your computer look really different, okay, weird on the screen or pag. This is because they weren’t designed to work with English. DaunPehn is designed to work with Khmer, Nyala to support Ethiopic and Gisha makes the Hebrew language look clean and clear on a screen. Vista comes with at least another dozen of these language specific scripts designed to support specific written languages and allow readers and writers in these languages to function in the online world.

Unless you use foreign languages during your work, all these fonts do is clutter up your fonts menus and make your Vista operating system run slower. Deleting these unneeded fonts can take a little pressure off your system and it you want to delete them, here’s how.

1. Log on as an Administrator.

2. You should make a backup of each of the fonts you plan on deleting, just in case something happens and you want to use these language specific fonts later. To accomplish this, just create a new folder while you’re on the Fonts Installer screen, give is a name you will remember, and then drag the fonts you want to backup into the new folder.

3. To delete the font, just highlight the font you want to delete, click File, and then choose delete from the list, and then respond to any prompts that appear.

4. Font management in Vista has not been changed noticeably in Vista; there have been a few small, welcome improvements, but that’s about it. The Font Installer is still available in Vista via the Control Panel or you can just open the Start Menu and type fonts into the Instant Search box provided. The only real difference between XP and Vista is the ability to view the currently selected font with the complete list of fonts, which works best if you maximize the window and then click and drag the divider between the font list and the sample display.

5. Using the Fonts Installer window you can install a new font by clicking File > Install New Font and then browse down the list until you reach the font files. Clicking on this file will open all the fonts for you to choose from. Click the font you want to install and click Install. Microsoft has made installing a new font easier in Vista, just right-click any font file no matter where it’s located and select Install from the pop-up menu.