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Synchronizing fonts
I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers.
"All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 51.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 45.7.1 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
Synchronizing fonts
Ken Springer wrote:
I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So don't use them. It is a good thing that you are having fun with your computer. But just in case you have something else to do... You might want to consider the possibility that messing with fonts is a complete waste of time. That is, unless you have some specific purpose for doing so, beyond imagining that you will save space or somehow impress others. Been there, done that. I would recommend a computer game instead. |
Synchronizing fonts
Ken Springer wrote:
I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. Normally, you would do things like this with a "Font Manager", which is a third-party program that handles fonts in "sets". This allows the system folder for the fonts, to remain unmodified. You pile your fonts into sets, place the sets in a file tree, then use the Font Manager to "turn the sets ON or OFF". This allows a person who owns 10,000 fonts, to continue to have a responsive computer, while turning on the fonts in sets of a thousand perhaps. I think there was some limit, in the Font Manager I tested, as to the size of the group of fonts. I don't think you can actually turn on 10,000 fonts at once. The limit might have been closer to a thousand, and I actually had to take some of them out of the test folder, before the Font Manager would work. I'm not a font expert, but I don't recommend handling them like ****ing into a bucket. There could be surprises later, if some document doesn't look right, and you can't figure out why. While some of the Truetype files might look the same to you (approx same file size), there can be big differences inside. And just leave the Asian fonts alone - they will be put back in short order, by some update. In my collection, I can see fontnav.msi fontnav.cab ( https://s11.postimg.org/ijuot4y6b/fontmainwin2.gif ) fontforge (an editor) https://fontforge.github.io/fontforge-tutorial.pdf Some of the software I have here, is just for testing or short-term usage for a project. For example, a trial version of CorelDraw had a font manager bundled with it, and the font manager can remain behind after you remove Corel Draw. (But that's the most basic font manager and not really all that wonderful.) Fontforge is the one that can show you pane after pane of character sets, inside the same font. While two font files might look the same, one can have a lot more useful entries in it than the other. This one is a subset font extracted from a PDF (you can see it is missing the letter Z). https://s11.postimg.org/jenzczpcz/fontforge.gif I used fontforge, as part of a project to "unmunge" a PDF document where the font tables were screwed up (on purpose) by a desktop publishing tool, to prevent copy and paste. After you remove the copy/paste protection on a PDF, there can be a second level of protection implemented by the two-stage character lookup involved. They can make it so the screen appearance is correct, and the Copy buffer is full of crap. It took me two weeks, with some scripts and Fontforge, but I actually managed to fix it. There aren't really all that many Font Managers, and perhaps only one good one per platform. Some will be commercial (Fontographer???). The so-called "free" ones are usually invented to sell fonts - as the tool will have an "easy URL link" in the menu, for visiting a font sales website. The one in Coreldraw was like that, except the business may have shut down or got sold off or something. It might have involved BitStream (just going from memory). These are not five minute projects, so take your time. And *don't* pour 10,000 fonts into some System folder. That's wrong on every platform. The fonts should have unique identifiers, but you never know. There is more to it than just the file name. Paul |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/2017 9:04 AM, Ken Springer wrote:
I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. Be very careful about deleting fonts. Some fonts that you think you do not need are used by Windows and various applications. Deleting those can break Windows and applications. Among such fonts might be Marlett, MS Outlook, and MT Extra. -- David E. Ross http://www.rossde.com/ Paraphrasing Mark Twain, who was quoting someone else: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and alternative truths. |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/2017 12:04 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. If you really *must* do something with fonts, I'd suggest leaving the "stock" fonts alone on all the systems, because as someone else mentioned, it is possible that the systems expect some of them, and that will differ. Then, load the fonts that you want to use on the other systems by getting versions of those fonts for the OSes. They probably aren't generic. -- best regards, Neil |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/17 12:12 PM, David E. Ross wrote:
On 2/23/2017 9:04 AM, Ken Springer wrote: I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. Be very careful about deleting fonts. Some fonts that you think you do not need are used by Windows and various applications. Deleting those can break Windows and applications. Among such fonts might be Marlett, MS Outlook, and MT Extra. LOL It looks like my post makes it sound like I'm going to be more aggressive with this than I really am. I'm only going to remove fonts not based on roman/Latin/western characters. Neither do I plan on removing any dingbat/graphic fonts. Since I don't read, write, or speak any Asian language, I do not need those fonts. Same for Cyrillic. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 51.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 45.7.1 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/17 12:57 PM, Neil wrote:
On 2/23/2017 12:04 PM, Ken Springer wrote: I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. If you really *must* do something with fonts, I'd suggest leaving the "stock" fonts alone on all the systems, because as someone else mentioned, it is possible that the systems expect some of them, and that will differ. Then, load the fonts that you want to use on the other systems by getting versions of those fonts for the OSes. They probably aren't generic. From what I can tell, most fonts work on most systems. I do have an old CD of Mac fonts in ttf format, that don't seem to want to work on newer systems. Haven't thoroughly checked that. But I doubt I'll ever use them at this point. OTOH, I do have a 500 font CD from Bitstream. Again, those fonts are not going to have the extended characters of a contemporary font, but the odds of using the extended characters are, for me, so high as to not being a consideration. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 51.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 45.7.1 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
Synchronizing fonts
Ken Springer wrote:
LOL It looks like my post makes it sound like I'm going to be more aggressive with this than I really am. Never underestimate the surgical skills of someone who owns a chainsaw. Paul |
Synchronizing fonts
"Ken Springer" wrote
| 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" | folder. | 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the | "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting | everything. | I do something similar and would recommend it as basic backup. Occasionally I get new fonts and I like a big selection of quality fonts to choose from for graphics. (It used to be common to get nice fonts with printers, but I haven't seen that for a long time.) I've also, occasionally, seen some of them disappear for no reason that I've been able to discern. So I always keep a backup folder and just choose to install all of them when necessary. Windows then refuses to install any that are already existing, which is fine. I don't know anything about cross-platform, though. Windows fonts in Mac? I don't know. When I've played with Linux in the past I've installed Windows fonts, under WINE I think, because that somehow, magically made the Linux fonts look OK. But aside from that I really don't know the relationship between the two. |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/2017 4:06 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 2/23/17 12:12 PM, David E. Ross wrote: On 2/23/2017 9:04 AM, Ken Springer wrote: I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. Be very careful about deleting fonts. Some fonts that you think you do not need are used by Windows and various applications. Deleting those can break Windows and applications. Among such fonts might be Marlett, MS Outlook, and MT Extra. LOL It looks like my post makes it sound like I'm going to be more aggressive with this than I really am. I'm only going to remove fonts not based on roman/Latin/western characters. Neither do I plan on removing any dingbat/graphic fonts. Since I don't read, write, or speak any Asian language, I do not need those fonts. Same for Cyrillic. You may not use them when you create documents, but if you wind up on a website that uses them, you're going to see a mess. Only the commonly used fonts in other languages are supplied with the OS. -- best regards, Neil |
Synchronizing fonts
On 02/23/2017 05:08 PM, Mayayana wrote:
I don't know anything about cross-platform, though. Windows fonts in Mac? I don't know. When I've played with Linux in the past I've installed Windows fonts, under WINE I think, because that somehow, magically made the Linux fonts look OK. But aside from that I really don't know the relationship between the two. I use Linux and just copy the ttf files to ~/.fonts Seems to work fine for me. |
Synchronizing fonts
"Neil" wrote
| I'm only going to remove fonts not based on roman/Latin/western | characters. Neither do I plan on removing any dingbat/graphic fonts. | Since I don't read, write, or speak any Asian language, I do not need | those fonts. Same for Cyrillic. | | You may not use them when you create documents, but if you wind up on a | website that uses them, you're going to see a mess. Only the commonly | used fonts in other languages are supplied with the OS. | I don't have any such fonts and it's not a problem. If I'm at a Chinese site I'll see little rectangles with hex codes defining unicode characters that can't be displayed. So I can't read the text. But I can't read Chinese, anyway. It's all Greek to me. :) I can't imagine why I'd want or need a Chinese font. The little boxes tell me what I need to know: This webpage will be of no use to me. |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/17 12:05 PM, Paul wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. Normally, you would do things like this with a "Font Manager", which is a third-party program that handles fonts in "sets". I didn't think about a font manager. For the small thing I want to do, I guess it just didn't occur to me. I had one installed on my Windows 7 computer for a long time. But something mangled it, and since I never used it, I removed it and never installed another one. The solutions sounds a bit of an overkill if I do it that way for 7 computers. The end game is to just simply have the same fonts on 5 different OSes, but 7 different computers. This allows the system folder for the fonts, to remain unmodified. You pile your fonts into sets, place the sets in a file tree, then use the Font Manager to "turn the sets ON or OFF". This allows a person who owns 10,000 fonts, to continue to have a responsive computer, while turning on the fonts in sets of a thousand perhaps. I probably own more than that, but have come to realize, I probably don't even need 500 installed! LOL I often use the same programs on all the computers, and depending on what I'm doing, I'll use different systems. So I just want all the installed fonts to be identical on each computer so I don't have to deal with anything that doesn't match. And when possible, I embed the font in the resulting file. I think there was some limit, in the Font Manager I tested, as to the size of the group of fonts. I don't think you can actually turn on 10,000 fonts at once. The limit might have been closer to a thousand, and I actually had to take some of them out of the test folder, before the Font Manager would work. I'm not a font expert, but I don't recommend handling them like ****ing into a bucket. There could be surprises later, if some document doesn't look right, and you can't figure out why. While some of the Truetype files might look the same to you (approx same file size), there can be big differences inside. This is something I've considered. I do know that old Arial files from Windows, say Windows for Workgroups, don't necessarily match the Arial font from newer files, and this is the basic characters. What I was thinking of doing, is starting with the oldest OS, adding those files to the "master" folder. Then the next oldest, and simply overwriting the files if there are duplicates. At the end, I should have the newer files installed everywhere. And just leave the Asian fonts alone - they will be put back in short order, by some update. In my collection, I can see fontnav.msi fontnav.cab ( https://s11.postimg.org/ijuot4y6b/fontmainwin2.gif ) fontforge (an editor) https://fontforge.github.io/fontforge-tutorial.pdf Some of the software I have here, is just for testing or short-term usage for a project. For example, a trial version of CorelDraw had a font manager bundled with it, and the font manager can remain behind after you remove Corel Draw. (But that's the most basic font manager and not really all that wonderful.) Fontforge is the one that can show you pane after pane of character sets, inside the same font. While two font files might look the same, one can have a lot more useful entries in it than the other. This one is a subset font extracted from a PDF (you can see it is missing the letter Z). I think, that at some point in the past, I had Fontforge installed. Since I don't have it now, it means I removed it for some reason. https://s11.postimg.org/jenzczpcz/fontforge.gif I used fontforge, as part of a project to "unmunge" a PDF document where the font tables were screwed up (on purpose) by a desktop publishing tool, to prevent copy and paste. After you remove the copy/paste protection on a PDF, there can be a second level of protection implemented by the two-stage character lookup involved. They can make it so the screen appearance is correct, and the Copy buffer is full of crap. It took me two weeks, with some scripts and Fontforge, but I actually managed to fix it. Did you post about this, as it seems familiar? There aren't really all that many Font Managers, and perhaps only one good one per platform. Some will be commercial (Fontographer???). The so-called "free" ones are usually invented to sell fonts - as the tool will have an "easy URL link" in the menu, for visiting a font sales website. The one in Coreldraw was like that, except the business may have shut down or got sold off or something. It might have involved BitStream (just going from memory). I used to have TypeFont installed, years ago. Create and modify fonts. Fonts really fascinated me more then than now, so I don't miss it. Windows 98 now that I think about it. Years ago, when I still used Atari computers, I had a font creation program. For a project, I needed to have moose prints running in a circle. I didn't have any good graphics program to do it with, so I created a font with just one character, which was a moose print. Then, ran the single letter in a circle to get what the customer wanted. These are not five minute projects, so take your time. And *don't* pour 10,000 fonts into some System folder. That's wrong on every platform. The fonts should have unique identifiers, but you never know. There is more to it than just the file name. Aware of this. I used to be into desktop publishing, like 20 years ago, and have a couple books on typography, and using type as part of the design process. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 51.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 45.7.1 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/17 3:21 PM, Neil wrote:
On 2/23/2017 4:06 PM, Ken Springer wrote: On 2/23/17 12:12 PM, David E. Ross wrote: On 2/23/2017 9:04 AM, Ken Springer wrote: I want to end up with the same fonts installed on all my computers. "All" is inclusive of various Windows systems, a Mac, and a couple Linux systems. Each system has some fonts I have no use for, Asian fonts for example. So I'm looking to come up with the most efficient method for accomplishing this. This is my current idea. 1. On the first system, delete the fonts I don't want. 2. Copy the fonts to a folder on an external drive 3. On the second system, attach the external drive and repeat Step 1. 4. Copy the fonts to same folder on the external drive. But do I overwrite the existing fonts when there are duplicates, skip, or add a copy. I don't want to get too picky. LOL 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" folder. 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting everything. Anyone have a quicker way to do this? No scripts, please, that's something I don't want to deal with since I'll be using different operating systems. Be very careful about deleting fonts. Some fonts that you think you do not need are used by Windows and various applications. Deleting those can break Windows and applications. Among such fonts might be Marlett, MS Outlook, and MT Extra. LOL It looks like my post makes it sound like I'm going to be more aggressive with this than I really am. I'm only going to remove fonts not based on roman/Latin/western characters. Neither do I plan on removing any dingbat/graphic fonts. Since I don't read, write, or speak any Asian language, I do not need those fonts. Same for Cyrillic. You may not use them when you create documents, but if you wind up on a website that uses them, you're going to see a mess. Only the commonly used fonts in other languages are supplied with the OS. I'm in Mayana's boat here, too. That's why I'm not worried about the other fonts. And if needed, I might be able to get Google or some other translation program to solve the issue. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 51.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 45.7.1 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
Synchronizing fonts
On 2/23/17 3:08 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote | 5. Repeat Steps 3 & 4 until I've gathered all the fonts into a "master" | folder. | 6. Take the external drive, and one by one, copy the fonts in the | "master" folder into all the font folders in the computers, overwriting | everything. | I do something similar and would recommend it as basic backup. Occasionally I get new fonts and I like a big selection of quality fonts to choose from for graphics. (It used to be common to get nice fonts with printers, but I haven't seen that for a long time.) I've also, occasionally, seen some of them disappear for no reason that I've been able to discern. So I always keep a backup folder and just choose to install all of them when necessary. Windows then refuses to install any that are already existing, which is fine. I don't know anything about cross-platform, though. Windows fonts in Mac? I don't know. When I've played with Linux in the past I've installed Windows fonts, under WINE I think, because that somehow, magically made the Linux fonts look OK. But aside from that I really don't know the relationship between the two. So far, I've not had an issues with simply copying the desired .ttf files into any font folder, similar to what Big Al does. My favorite serif font is Linux Libertine. http://www.linuxlibertine.org/index.php?id=1&L=1 Different places have different packages of these fonts, and when I've copied the "missing" font files, everything has worked fine. So I'm not expecting any problems with what I want to do. Someday, I may just break out that CD of Mac TTF fonts I mentioned, and give them a try. IIRC, all of them are display fonts, so for documents they will be of limited use. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 51.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 45.7.1 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
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