Organizing Fonts

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

Originally Posted by Gary Hair
Holy mackerel, 37K fonts??? I have about 20 or 30 that I use regularly and even that seems to be too many... No wonder you crashed FN!

LOL You can never have too many fonts - even if you never use 36,799 of them! Font Navigator couldn't handle the Corel Fonts without wrecking havoc on three of my machines. I didn't even try to let it manage 1k fonts, let alone 37k. Font Expert has a search feature, so when a customer asks for a font, I can quickly find it and install it!

Originally Posted by John W. Love
I remember him telling me one day that having too many fonts "installed" would terrorize Windows.

Yes. I have been told this theory many times over the years and have seen many tech references to this issue too. I have repaired countless computers over the years that the only problem was the user installed gobs of fonts that they downloaded from freebie sites or CD collections. Once the fonts were reduced to a manageable size, Windows and all their software programs were well-behaved again.

Originally Posted by Mike Null
I don't agree with your statement. If you have the fonts on your system and catalog and install them in Font Navigator they will stay there.

You are entitled to your own opinions. I have experienced FN to crash on three separate machines with two different operating systems. All the problems I experienced disappeared when I uninstalled Font Navigator and removed all traces from the registry on all three machines. I don't claim to be an expert, but I do know my way very well around computers - both inside and out.

[Mike Null]

Mike

I obviously wasn't talking about 37,000 fonts. I have about 4,000 and FN has performed just fine in the 10 years I've had it.

There was a small glitch a couple of years ago but the service pack fixed it.

[Dan Hintz]

Windows tries to add a hook for every font installed, causing memory issues. Too many installed fonts (1k approaches that number) and you see issues with memory segmentation. The same issue comes up if you install/uninstall a bunch of programs that leave detritus in the registry... the registry is loaded at boot time, so as it gets full of useless stuff load times take longer, it has to read through more junk each time it needs to find something, etc.

It's as much the fault of Windows as it is the programs that don't do a good job at uninstalling themselves completely.