Back in the last century there was the wonderful operating system of DOS and, if you were adventurous, adding Windows 3.1 gave you the choice of different fonts. As one added a font, resources became a little lower. I don't remember what the limitation was, but there were only so many one could add before the system fell over. Win 95 improved things, and Windows 98 gave you much better resources in terms of fonts. If you used the command line, you felt as though you'd committed a terrible sin.

Coming from the publishing industry as a typesetter, I could hardly wait to purchase a computer and printer that would print documents using graphics and those different fonts. These days I use WinXP Pro that has almost none of the limitations of its predecessor in relation to fonts.

Being a font and freeware freak I downloaded  an application called The Font Thing which gives me a list of installed fonts together with a preview, and the choice of deleting one or more. After being somewhat savage in deleting many of the 900 or more fonts I wound up with 343 installed.

I come from the school of thinking that one sans serif font is much like another, so having heaps of those is a waste of space and resources. Ask yourself this: do I use many of my fonts in printed letters, and is having plenty essential to view documents on screen.

During my first foray I found that I had both Bernhard Fashion and Bernie Normal installed. Bernhard Fashion is copyright, but Bernie Normal is freeware.

Guess which was deleted...

Getting down to deleting fonts that in my opinion had no reason to exist, I selected several that were all uppercase letters. After all - everyone has a shift and caps lock key!

The sans serif fonts were next to be inspected. During this foray I noticed that I had several monospaced (that means every character is the same width) sans serif fonts I decided I really only needed one.


I kept the letter gothic, Arial, and Hobby. After all, they are different, but both sans serif. Not only that, almost everyone has Arial, so will be able to view hypertext pages without needing to download it.

The ones below deserved to stay because of their name (what better than Frew in the name) or style (icons as characters).


You can propably guess why I kept Renfrew, and Sports Three MT has some good characters for producing symbols into your printed document. There are now 214 fonts.

Next stop: save this document to local drive C: - check that pages are saved with correct names, then collect data for next month's edition.