Remove Noto Sans

Report · Oct 18, 2023

I saw where there was another post on this marked as "resolved," but the resolution steps to resolve it no longer work. How — in the year of our Lord 2024 when Photoshop AI can blow our minds — can we NOT hide all of the Noto Sans fonts? Adobe points at Apple, Apple points at Adobe, and designers are caught in a very annoying situation between them.

Report · Oct 18, 2023

Hi @jefffultondesign:

You are not alone in your frustration regarding Noto Sans. Have you seen this post?

https://creativepro.com/how-to-hide-noto-fonts-in-your-font-menus/

~Barb

Report · Oct 18, 2023

Microsoft is doing something similar on the Windows OS, too. We now have a million+ foreign language fonts that can't be uninstalled or deactivated. They're not the Noto Family (which is excellent when you need it, BTW) but instead individual fonts by many different font foundries for various Asian, Middle Eastern, and SE Asian dialects.

It's a nice idea to give us the ability to be "world ready" in our document designs. But I can't foresee needing to use Aharoni or Aparajita anytime soon in my design career.

Apple and Microsoft should at least let us deactivate unneeded fonts so we can have more manageable font menus. Then, if I do suddenly have the need to use Estrangelo Edessa Regular (a Syriac script font for ancient Aramaic dialects that's installed with Windows), it's still on my system and can be quickly activated.

Of course, if the need arises.

Fonts on both platforms are becoming a nightmare for us designers!

I'm ready to start a revolt!

Report · Dec 23, 2023

I'm the guy who actually uses all those fonts, and even I feel this way. Months might go by when I don't use any fonts for languages from, let's say, the Indian subcontinent. I'd love to not have to scroll past them every day.

Once upon a time, early on in my career, I used font management software. It was very useful, until it blew up in my face and I was late delivering a time-sensitive project, because Suitcase ate my Khmer font library. I swore I'd never use font management tools ever again, and I've held true to that oath. That was on a machine that ran ~~System~~ Mac OS 8 point something, to give you an idea of how long I've been nurturing this grudge.

But I still can't shake the idea, decades later, that it might be a good idea to be able to turn fonts on and off, so we're not scrolling past eight thousand fonts for languages we're not working on today, while we're looking for That One Syriac Font. I'm not even asking for auto-activation; I simply would like to to be able to choose.

Report · Dec 22, 2023

Font management is without doubt the most primitive feature in the entire OS history. The only conclusion I can come to is that its deliberate.

Report · Dec 22, 2023

The only conclusion I can come to is that its deliberate.
By @Moonshiner1111

Yes! It is indeed deliberate, but not so primitive.

I don't know why we can't hide/inactivate all those Noto fonts on Apples and all of the foreign languages and dialects on Windows, but I'm sure in involves money somewhere and somehow.

Report · Dec 23, 2023

That both MS and Apple do it, turned up to 11, and remain stubbornly mute on both why and any potential options... grrr. It's enough to make you switch to the other guys.

Oh, wait, that's right... there aren't any other guys.

Report · Dec 26, 2023

It's enough to make you switch to the other guys.

Oh, wait, that's right... there aren't any other guys.
By @James Gifford—NitroPress

Called monopoly, cartel, feature-fixing that works like price-fixing among industries.

Hello FTC!

Report · Dec 26, 2023

Good luck with that.

Report · Dec 26, 2023

Font Traduction Council? 🙂

I just can't figure out the point here. Cui bono, and all that. It's not like we pay for the fonts (in any direct or measureable way) or have to pony up licensing fees, and Big Typography is one elderly man in New Jersey with a cat.

Report · Dec 26, 2023

US Federal Trade Commission which investigates unfair trade practices.

The problem is that our two major operating systems (that the majority of users must use, either Windows or Apple) and two major software vendors (Microsoft and Adobe) have forced unnecessary fonts on users.

That's not so benign -- each font eats up RAM, slows down the computer, especially when generating a list of available fonts, takes too much time to scroll through an unnecessarily long list, and overall slows productivity.

If these companies want to give us these fonts to use, that's fine. But users must be able to disable or delete them. It's like "opting-out" of the pre-installed fonts.

If the companies want to charge us for very character in our documents that uses their fonts, fine. I can't stop them from doing that -- as long as I'm warned that the fonts aren't free. BUT I must be given the choice to use their fonts, or disable them, or use another brand of fonts.

The issue is similar to the original monopolization by OS vendors in the early 90s, when Microsoft used unfair programming to prevent other non-MS software from running on Windows. If you create an operating system, you must allow end users to install and use their software of choice.

And in terms of fonts, if they are installed by the OS manufacturer and I have no control over them, then I should be able to use them in any program by any other manufacturer.

Big Typographpy isn't a guy with a cat!

It's multi-billion dollar companies: Monotype (which has acquired the majority of independent font foundries), Adobe, Microsoft and even Apple. And the font industry is moving to charge users to use their fonts. Monotype, Emigre, Font Haus, etc. all charge for use of their fonts in PDFs, EPUBs, digital media, websites, etc.

What's stopping Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe from doing the same?

Report · Dec 26, 2023

Humor alert, there. 🙂

I limit my concern to the simple why here; there doesn't seem to be a single technical, market, 'artistic' or even 'world community' justification for locking every installation into this monolithic wall o'fonts. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like a corporate statement on the matter, even a flimsy one. They just do it and remain mute, ignoring all questions and pleas to change things.

Report · Dec 26, 2023

Totally agree with you, @James Gifford—NitroPress. And it certainly is bad business to royally tick off your customers with a wall o' fonts that can't be managed.

It sure points out that those who make the decisions at these companies don't know their customers or how they use the software.

Report · Dec 26, 2023

Seems like a good feature request—add a option to the filters in InDesign’s type panels to filter out System and Adobe required fonts.

With scripting you can get the fonts’ paths, so it should be fairly easy to build a plugin or script panel that would display a font list with no system fonts. I posted a simple dialog script example for MacOS and CC2024 here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-font-api-favourites/m-p/14316718#M55547...

Report · Dec 26, 2023

I suspect that the difficulty, and basis for the cross finger pointing, is that fonts embedded at the system level are persistent/permanent objects that would have to be laboriously filtered or managed at every instance. That is, every time an app makes a fonts list call, the filtering or system override function would have to be invoked. It's not a matter of making one filtered list, but blocking those 'aggressive' fonts at every point of listing.

Which comes back to the question of why this massive list of fonts needs to be an OS-level entity. Not just system resource, but OS-embedded. Makes no sense.

(In the earliest years, I'd set aside an hour to go in at a system level and remove all the fonts I didn't want from each new Windows installation. That quickly became tedious and requiring of too much time. I also recall something changing to make it harder, even on an alternately-booted system. AppleSoft is just so damned insistent about this practice...)

Report · Dec 26, 2023

When I filter for Adobe Type (cloud) fonts the system and required fonts are not listed, so I don’t see why a different filter condition can’t be added—we just need to hide the font from the list, it doesn’t need to be disabled.

My bare-bones scripted list works for MacOS Ventura with CC2024, but it should be trivial to add other OS system font folder paths to the array of folders to skip when building the list.

Report · Dec 26, 2023

That could be me, but I don't have a cat. 🙂