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