Installed Font Hider #44786
Description
Description of the new feature / enhancement
There is a Windows feature which "hide fonts", except it does not act as expected and actually remove fonts from the list provided by any program's font-select drop down menu, whether microsoft or third party.
The minimum viable product would be a binary toggle in the Power Toys Program. Off, it'd do nothing. On, it would:
- Read what fonts a user has installed
- Note each fonts 'hidden' state
- Use that information to abridge a list of installed but NON-hidden fonts
- Replace the contents of any font-select drop down menu that pulls from installed fonts with the abridged list.
Additional features could include:
- Being able to manipulate the hidden status of fonts in Power Toys directly.
- Being able to define the order of the list other than alphabetical.
- Enabling users to define and switch betwixt 'font profiles' so that particular fonts are only visible when needed.
- Being able to assign fonts 'Nicknames' to be displayed in the menu instead of the fonts name.
- Being able to override windows default Display font's name in the font behavior of the drop down menu, either universally or for specific fonts.
Scenario when this would be used?
Windows 11, by default, has 211 fonts installed across 69 families. In MSPaint, it's 12 pages to scroll through. It can take upwards of a minute to swap between Arial and Times New Roman on a middling-focus day because I have to scroll through a gross of Bahnschrift and Microsoft [Chinese Fonts (Various)] and Segeo UI (various), only to overshoot and need to scroll back up; by which point, Ive probably forgotten what font I wanted to pick when I opened the menu. On a bad day, it might take me 5 minutes.
It is a cluttered and overwhelming user experience that was out of date the day it went live. and that's before even considering the dozens of user-installed and user-created fonts I added mixed into the pile.
This requested power toy would be useful to artists, graphic designers, writers, type-setters, and anyone who has ever had the displeasure of scrolling past the "Microsoft" section of the default font-select drop down.
Clarification of request's intent
To be clear, this isn't a request for a font manager that controls what fonts are and aren't installed on Windows. You cannot, according to microsoft Independent Advisor DaveM, uninstall as many fonts as are unwanted on my machine without "caus[ing] system corruption."
This is a request for an immediary filter between what is installed and what is displayed in a font-select drop down menu. Something I feel is sorely needed, and judging by how times the ineffective tutorial to hide fonts on windows has been copy-pasted and rewrit across the internet, and how many times the question has been asked on reddit and/or microsoft support, I imagine others desire the functionality as well.