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I'd like to delete some fonts, but I'm afraid I'll remove some that Word needs. What fonts do I have to keep?

Article contributed by Suzanne S. Barnhill

There is no practical limit to the number of fonts you can have on your system if you are running Windows 2000 or later (see below...).

But the more fonts you have, the longer it takes the system to load (though processor speed and amount of installed RAM are also issues here). So it is not a bad idea to rid yourself of fonts you know you will never use. There are a number of fonts, however, that you absolutely must or should not uninstall.

At the top of the list are any fonts used by Windows to display applications. In Control Panel | Display | Appearance | Advanced, find out what fonts are used in Windows title bars, menus, message boxes, and so on. Depending on the version of Windows and your own personalized settings, these may include MS Sans Serif, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, and others. Windows and Word also need Marlett, which provides some of the graphic elements used in menus and toolbars, but you needn’t worry about this, as it is a Hidden font and so doesn't show up in the Fonts folder, anyway.

The “Windows core fonts” include Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, Symbol, and Wingdings (plus their bold, italic, and bold italic variants where applicable). Most Windows programs (especially Word) expect to find these fonts installed. Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New are used extensively in the built-in styles in Word 2003 and earlier, and some of the AutoCorrect entries depend on Wingdings or Symbol characters. Microsoft later introduced “Windows core fonts for the Web” that are used in many Web pages; in addition to Times New Roman and Arial, these are Andale Mono, Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Impact, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, and Webdings. The “C fonts” installed with Office 2007 (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel) are also used extensively in that version of Word.

You will probably want to leave installed any fonts you have used in documents that you may need to access and print again. But if you move these fonts to another folder for safekeeping, they are easily reinstalled when needed. There are also third-party font managers that will install and uninstall fonts on the fly; most such applications store the fonts in sets that can be installed for particular projects.