.fon fonts in WIndows 10

Yves Michel
Yves Michel Posts: 181
in Technique and Theory
I don't know if this is the right place to ask my question.

I've got a lot (+- 200) .fon fonts cluttering my Fonts directory in C:\Windows
Are these fonts necessary? Mandatory? Can I delete them without problem?

It seems that sometimes those numerous fonts slow the system down.

Any help from you professionals would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,126
    The raster fonts that come with Windows 10 are: Courier Regular, Fixedsys Regular, Modern Regular, MS Sans Serif Regular, MS Serif Regular, Roman Regular, Script Regular, Small Fonts Regular, System Bold and Terminal. My computer has one additional one, Arena Chess Figurine Regular. If you have 200 .fon files, then apparently additional fonts have been installed on your system. Whether this is legitimate, or those files are being used by malware to hide a malicious payload is something I can't determine from here.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 181
    Thank you John,
    Happily, those .fon files are relatively small, so I guess I'd better leave them in peace where they are.
    But it's very difficult to find good information about what's in this Font directory. For instance, you have to find what a .ttc file is.
    And you wonder why all those Microsoft system .ttf fonts are almost impossible to delete.

    I don't think malware is present on my system. But you never know??
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,173
    A .fon file is a collection of .fnt bitmap fonts, so is it possible that you are seeing a count of the .fnt contents? There will be one .fnt file for each bitmap size in the .fon, so it is easily possible that a smaller number of .fon files would contain c. 200 .fnt files.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 181
    Thank you John!
    Are you aware of a comprehensive explanation of all these fonts related files in the C:\Windows\Fonts directory? I mean .fon .fnt  .ttc .CompositeFont
    I didn't find this.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,869
    The C:\Windows\Fonts directory contains not only fonts installed by your operating system, but also fonts installed by apps, and even fonts installed by you.

    That said, at least some of those formats are uncommon enough that you are not likely to run into examples other than those installed by Microsoft.
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 206
    There are around 190 .fon files that ship with windows, but they include DPI and code page variants. So, only a handful of them get loaded into GDI. Also, are not used by DWrite. These are not slowing your system down. They're harmless, so I would just leave them alone.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 181
    Thank you all!
    As they're harmless and don't slow the system, I'll leave them alone, as you explained.
    You answered my question efficiently!

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