Install font advice needed.

[dogbone]

I'm doing an erase and install on a new s/h comp and I'm at the bit where I need to choose whether to install additional fonts or not.

All those chinese system fonts in my own mac are really annoying. But I notice that it also installs support for Arabic but I'm not sure how that would affect the computer if I left it out.

For example if I chose not to install the extra fonts for Chinese to Inuktitut and I went to a Chinese or Russian web site would my browser still display correctly?.

I'm happy to get rid of all the superfluous languages but I don't want to break anything.

 

[mad jew]

Not having these fonts would almost certainly affect viewing sites in these languages. However, would that really matter? The sites will revert back to a font you do have which may or may not include the appropriate characters for that language, meaning the site's proportions and text may look funny. If you can't read these languages anyway, that shouldn't really matter though. Also, at worst you can run an Archive & Install to get the fonts back, or you could even extract them manually from the OSX discs using Pacifist. 🙂

 

[dogbone]

That's good because at the last moment I decided to put them in and maybe trash them later.

It's mainly all the chinese fonts and similar because they show up in font menus and make them tedious, to use. But they are at the system level and I cannot disable them. What sort of problems am I liable to have if I trash say all the chinese system fonts. Bearing in mind I see mainly question marks on chinese sites as it is at the moment anyway. I'm also not interested in having them to use in a design or anything.

Oh I just thought, what if I took all those weirdo system fonts out of the system folder and put them in the user folder as their own list, so they could be disabled most of the time and enabled if it was necessary. Or is that going to break something.

 

[mad jew]

Both options should be fine. When it comes to removing languages, the basic English ones are all that must be kept. As for fonts, feel free to remove any non-system fonts. It should be fine to keep them as user fonts too, although I've never actually tried this. It's probably just less effort to remove them entirely though, and reinstall if necessary later down the track. 🙂