I keep seeing these 1,000+ font CDs all over the place, and I was wondering if I added all these to my system, if I would see a performance hit.
I doubt it, personally, but somebody (former co-worker, IIRC) said that it would take up RAM. Anybody have the last word on this?
I’m running Win2K on a 1.2 GHz Athlon with 640 MB of RAM, by the way.
Well, I am far from a computer whiz but I’m pretty sure that the fonts that go with your word processing or publishing software are stored on the disc and not in RAM. That is, all of them are not loaded into RAM every time you open the program. The only possible performance effect that I can think of might be in the access time required to find the particular font that you call for. And I really don’t see any problem there worth worrying about. The limitation on machine speed is in the Input/Output functions like writing to the monitor or to the printer, accessing the disc etc. and not in the data handling speed of the processor or even the time to read and write to the RAM.
Fact 1. 10 years ago personal computers could be perceptably sped up by removing as many fonts as possible. Operating systems tended to come with many more than typically used.
Fact 2. Some software today still advises to limit or reduce the number of fonts to improve loading time.
Comment. 1,000 fonts is a lot more than almost anyone uses, and they’re liable to get in your way.
Another comment. There’s a difference between fonts. Really expensive fonts (such as Times and Arial in Windows) or ones purchased from Adobe are noticably better for many purposes than ones someone knocked off in a garage. The 1,000 font CDs are sure to have plenty brand Eeech fonts.
Each font you have loaded into Windows does indeed take up more space in your system’s RAM. Unless you have ample memory installed in your system, you should remove the ones you never use.
If you buy a CD with 1000’s, you just install the ones you want, and if you ever need others you can install those later.
You know what? I opened my publishing program and switched fonts several times. I noted no disk activity, so partly_warmer is right and I was wrong. Fonts are loaded into RAM along with the rest of the program.
I guess the only honorable thing to do now is slash my wrists.
partly_warmer is also on the beam when he says that not all that many fonts are needed. For my 60th high school class reunion I put together a little booklet containing short biographies of class members. In the sample draft that I took with me to get peoples’ input I used all sorts of fancy fonts for variety. People in general didn’t like the fancy ones and preferred readability by a wide margin. I now use about 4 or 5 fonts, tops, and go for readability and good looks rather than frou-frou curlyques and other nonsense.
David, save those wrists for a really special occasion: there need to be more smiley faces in my messages or something – I wasn’t responding to your comment. Now that I’ve taken the time to read and consider it, you’re probably right in many situations. The Photoshop program I was thinking about is excessively concerned with performance, and they load all kinds of things in during startup so all the tools look seemless – so one guesses.
It seems much harder to use fonts effectively than it first appears, no question. Select nice-looking text, convert to something else that looks wickedly wonderful in isolation . . . presto! Illegible! Even so, I’ve been dying to get my hands on Fontographer and design a few fonts in my own garage.
I can attest to as recently as Windows 98 that a hundred extra fonts substantially slowed down almost all operations.
Typically, with those fonts CDs, you can reduce the number by ~100 or more if you look through them and pick out the typefaces whose designs are extremely similar. You don’t have to look at every font. The ones that say ‘Normal’ or ‘Regular’ are enough basis for comparison. In the 1,000+ font CDs I have, I’ve been able to discard several dozen fonts by doing this.
Mac users can go another step by condensing the fonts into a smaller number of suitcases. The CD literally has 1,000 fonts fonts, but they kind of cheat-- they give you as many as five or six variations of the same basic typeface. To use font names most of us recognize, there’ll be Times, Times Italic, Times Condensed, Times Expanded, Times Bold, Times Expanded Bold, and so on. There can’t be more than 125 separate families in those CDs, but counting each variation bumps the number up past 1,000.
To clear the clutter, you can move the name-suffixed fonts out of their respective suitcases and put them into one single family-named suitcase. Instead of having eight separate font suitcases with one font file in each of them, you’ll have a single suitcase with eight font files in it.
This ability comes in handy, as the Mac OS (pre OS X, at least) can only recognize the first 128 font files in its Fonts folder. If you don’t consolidate them, it may mean that seven of your fonts will be ignored by the system software, which may be either annoying or downright problematic.
This method doesn’t allow you to save on the RAM those fonts would take when you launch your word processing or graphics program, of course; the font files have been resorted, not deleted or condensed. If the RAM’s important to you, you can delete (or store elsewhere) the the bold and italics version of the fonts, as most programs will allow you to make those modifications your text.
David Simmons, one reason why you don’t see HDD activities is those font files are typically very small. Unless you keep a constant watch, all it takes is a fraction of a second to read that into main memory.
You are completely correct that nobody needs a thousand fonts, choose a few typefaces with a wide variety of effects ranging from black to thin to conduced. Pick a couple of serif family, a couple of sans serif, a modern or two, and a few decorative and special (scripts, symbols, foreign languages, dingbats), and you are set.
I just checked my Windows ME fonts, and discovered 155, instead of the 30 or so when I last checked. These were added curtesy of Photoshop, Framemaker, or UMAX? Who knows.
Anyway, the change from 30 fonts to 155 hasn’t been causing MS Word to load or operate any slower that I noticed. So again, it probably depends on the situation.
Now pardon me while I weed my fonts folder . . . .
Hmm… well, I started noticing that my computer began starting up about 20-30% slower a while back. Now that I think about it, it started at about the same time I randomly began downloading a crapload of fonts for use in PSP. Methinks the two are interconnected.
I should delete a bunch of 'em and see if that gives me any performance boost…
There are many font managers available, some for free. The best that I have used is Adobe Type Manager. The PC version is somewhat harder to use then the Mac, but it is still a very good program. It allows you to activate only the fonts you are using and thus free up RAM. But speaking as someone who has to fix other peoples files in order to make them print correctly, I would like to see a law passed that says no one may have more then 100 fonts on their computer 
Thank you all for your responses - it looks like I won’t be installing every font under the sun after all. 
Adobe’s website doesn’t yield a lot of info about ATM. By the sound of it you can store all your non-system fonts somewhere other than the windows “font” folder and activate them as you see necessary, correct? If so, well, that could come in handy.
Yes, with ATM you store the fonts anywhere you want, and just set a path to them. You then activate and deactivate when you use them.