You don't have a virus. You have MS Office. (How to fix unwieldy font menus)
You've removed those unwanted Microsoft Office fonts from your system but they keep coming back!
No, you don't have a virus, you have Microsoft Office.
Recently on the Typophile Twitter feed we called out for tutorials to help MS Office users prevent Office from automatically reinstalling unwanted fonts. Not that we don't like the fonts. We just can't stand a software philosophy that doesn't give users a choice, especially when it means endlessly scrolling through font menus.
The community responded with a handful of links. These aren't tested or proven. Follow their advice at your own risk:
@kiranmaxweber said: @Typophile A few Office font management resources we use: http://tinyurl.com/dl7y8k , http://tinyurl.com/27jx2e and http://tinyurl.com/c79pf2
@tgambrill said: @Typophile the Extensis PDF "Best Font Practices..." lists core M$ fonts and how to prevent auto-reinstall. pgs8-9: http://is.gd/onN2
@macartisan said: @Typophile The good news re Office 2008 fonts is that '08 apparently doesn't attempt "auto-repair" font reinstall on launch like X & 2004.
And finally, as if to temper any glimmer of exuberance that you could shorten your font menu by 40%, there's this cautionary tweet:
@pschoe01 said: @Typophile check this out http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Disable-Fonts.html
Got any more MS Office font tips? Share them here.
- Joe Pemberton's blog
- Login or register to post comments
23.Mar.2009 1.53am
No, you don’t have a virus, you have Microsoft Office.
But MS Office is a virus.
And as such there's actually only one true way of dealing with it:
thorough system-wide cleansing. >;->
SCNR.
23.Mar.2009 9.49am
Yes. Viruses like to reinstall themselves after you've deleted them.
23.Mar.2009 11.35am
Presumably, MS considers the fonts necessary for document compatibility between Office users, which is not an entirely unreasonable notion, since the average Office user probably does not want to deal with managing fonts. I think it might have been better to do as Adobe has done with its private font folder. Fonts installed there are available only in Adobe apps.