How many fonts are too many?

Every now and again I go through the fonts in my Win98SE setup to do a
bit of a clean out. I always notice there are new fonts there. It
seems that many applications install fonts but they are left there
when you uninstall the application.

Thinking about the drain on resources, how many fonts would be too
many? I currently have 152.

 

My approach to this problem is to have a second fonts folder –
Fonts_Hold – and transfer to it any fonts other than the system fonts
loaded with the operating system.

Fonts I have added myself remain in the original folder.

Many programs load variations of 'standard' fonts to circumvent
copyright issues. Programs for making cards, etc often load a raft of
fonts of very dubious quality, and these are the first to go.

If after a period none of the programs I use frequently or
occasionally fail to display properly, I can then remove the unused or
unwanted fonts.

Noting that Windows counts the regular, italic, bold and bold
italics as four fonts, I'd say that if you have more than 60–70 fonts
loaded you will have a number that can be removed to the Hold folder

 

Ooh, you might be red-lining it somewhat. Anything over about 200 and
windoze, especially the 9x versions, starts having aneurisms. Something
about it being hardwired to keep all fonts in memory whether in use or not.

I made the mistake of installing 1500 fonts off a CD once. Wasn't a pretty
sight.

 

Never really thought about this before - on checking, I have 567 fonts
loaded.

Problem will be - which ones to safely remove?

 

Yeah, I've seen a pc slowed down to the speed of an old calculator due to
approx 3000 fonts.

Rider

 

Hi there,

That shouldn't be too bad, but depends on yer hardware...if you
notice slowness when clicking on a dropdown preview list of
them then perhaps its time to clean out some you don't use or
like...

I've installed around 600, but I'm using KDE desktop in Linux on
an Athlon64 platform. The font preview lists in OpenOffice and Gimp
are pretty much instantaneous. Dragging the slider from one end
of the preview list to the other is also smooth as a babys bum...

--
Kind regards,

Chris Wilkinson, Brisbane, Australia.
Anyone wishing to email me directly can remove the obvious
spamblocker, and replace it with t p g <dot> c o m <dot> a u

 

The limit to the number of fonts that you can have installed on a
Micro$oft Windows box is dictated by the maximum size that a registry key
can be.

Thus, depending on the number of characters in the name of the font, you
can have more than a thousand fonts installed - and sometimes, more than
twelve hundered fonts without adversely impacting on the performance of
well written software.

Only having 152 fonts installed... is absolutely nothing to worry about.


Undeniably Sluttish