So I fired up Word. Yeah, after Microsoft being asses in the summer and my cancellation of the subscription. I waited a week or two then created another subscription that was for me only.
I don’t know why the idiots at Microsoft make it so difficult to change your subscription from Family, to Individual.
Nonetheless, I was able to signup using a different email address. If you try to use the email that you cancelled, Microsoft will only allow you to buy the PREVIOUS SUBSCRIPTION.
You know, the one you were trying to alter…
Talking to Microsoft gets you to someone in India who is completely unhelpful and honestly… a bit obnoxious.
Anyhow, I fired up Word to type a letter. It wasn’t anything special but I don’t like the default font that came up in the blank document. Not really thinking about it, I pulled the font list down and was immediately presented with hundreds of fonts.
A large number of those fonts were from languages that I don’t speak. I was sitting here thinking I don’t need Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, or Tagalog. I figured I’d leave one representative example of these languages in the event that some email or webpage I stumbled upon used them. But I saw no need to have 10 variations of each installed on my system.
That’s when I found that I could delete pretty much anything I wanted to delete, except Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, or Tagalog. I thought at first that I could delete any European character set, but couldn’t delete anything else. I’ve found that I can’t delete a few European character sets. The restriction doesn’t seem anywhere as broad as it is for non-European sets.
I found the font I was looking for and typed my letter.
As I was typing I began to wonder and remember there was a time when you’d have English (because you purchased your computer in the US. If you wanted additional languages you purchased the corresponding character sets and installed them.
My early personal systems had only European characters. Because I worked in the printing and font industry, I’d added Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew.
I don’t think I ever had more than 20 or 30 fonts on my system. Now there are 387 fonts! Fully 1/3 of those fonts are fonts to languages I don’t read and rarely see.
Fonts themselves aren’t all that large, but having all these fonts makes my Font Dropdown in Word and other applications a pain in the ass to utilize.
You’d think deletion or deactivation would be an option. Apparently I’m terribly misinformed.
Do I really need Urdu?
I have been able to deactivate a large number of the foreign fonts. Don’t get me wrong, some of the Kanji fonts and Arabic fonts are beautiful to look at, but without the ability to read or write in those languages the fonts are simply in the way.
I suppose I’m a minimalist when it comes to computers, and phones. I tend to only have stuff on my technology that is used frequently. I like being able to see exactly what I”m looking for and not have to weed through a ton of distracting crap.
(See, “some of the Kanji fonts are beautiful…”) that’s how you know I got lost just trying to find a favorite Adobe font, to type my letter.
Being someone who may well be a legitimate ADHD person, I actively try to minimize distractions. If I don’t, I never get anything done. I’ll get started on a project, but if there are too many distractions I’m going to wander off into the weeds and never get back to the project I was working on.
This is especially true if I’m stirred up emotionally about something.
This has made me wonder if our headlong rush into preserving or mandating diversity. As in the case of the fonts on my computer doesn’t inadvertently do a couple of things.
1) We forget that those among the population who are legitimately ADHD aren’t being served at all by putting distractions in their way. ADHD folks like diversity and bright shiny objects, but too much stimulation causes us to be completely unproductive because we like chasing things down rabbit holes… Until we’re bored, or something else catches our attention.
2) Aren’t we diminishing everyone’s freedom of choice when we force diversity upon them. I’m not talking about people here. You’ll always run across different people. But when even our technology, A.K.A. our tools have an enforced DEI can you really say that we own the tools? If something is mine, then I should be allowed to customize and configure that tool exactly the way I want it. I shouldn’t have to wade through things I don’t want just to get to the things I do. In this case 55 fonts that serve no purpose and that I’ll never use to find the one font that I purchased and installed because I prefer it.
By attempting to include everyone, we have excluded whole groups of folks “On the Spectrum” because we’re throwing bright shiny objects, metaphorically, in their path.
Perhaps we should get back to allowing someone to select what they want or need when they’re installing an operating system.
I wouldn’t mind spending 10 minutes answering configuration questions about my computer when I’m upgrading or installing an operating system.
What language(s) do you speak?
Do you want to install only character sets compatible with those languages?
Do you want to install Emojis, and special graphical character sets such as Dingbats?
Are there any other languages or character sets you’d like to install such as Math symbols, or Map symbols?
You can add additional fonts or languages from the control panel later is you desire.
Letter typed, I spent some time trying to figure out if I was missing something in turning fonts on or off. That led me to wondering what other fonts I could buy, which led me to wandering through font catalogs and coming to the conclusion that I didn’t really want to spend money on fonts right now.
Which led me to updating my Desktop publishing and Graphics software. Then I wandered digitally into a couple of rabbit holes before I remembered that I needed to print an envelope to go with the letter I’d finished a couple of hours ago. That required updating the laser printer driver, and so on…
Which is how I lose many hours just trying to do the simplest of things. And now it’s time for lunch.
How’s your day progressing?