MS Office Add-in for MainType Font Groups

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fontuser
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MS Office Add-in for MainType Font Groups

Post by fontuser »

Problem
With a standard install of Windows, (MS) Office and a few other applications, the Font folder (and the font list in Office applications) quickly gets bloated with several hundred (or even more) Fonts. The problem here is everyday handling, as the list of Fonts that are actually required in everyday standard use of Word, Excel or PowerPoint is often rather short. Having to scroll past two- or three-hundred Fonts (or look it up within this long list every time) to the one you need is not really good usability.
In order to keep things clear, it would be good to remove all unused and unwanted Fonts from the list.
De-installing all unwanted Fonts would be the obvious solution, but unfortunately this often leads to unforseeable strange and annoying behaviour by applications when they lack a necessary Font. There is no way to determine which Fonts are essential for the use and regular functioning of applications (i.e. giving a warning or blocking uninstall) - including MS Office - and thus a try-and-error approach is not really feasible when you haved to sift through said several hundred fonts this way and check several applications every time you change one font.

The "recently used" feature in MS Office mitigates the problem a bit, but you need to use a Font for it to work and it resets once you close the application.

Now Windows offers the handy setting of "hiding" a Font. This will keep it on the system (i.e. available), but - in theory - mask it from displaying within the "available Fonts" list in applications lilke Word, PowerPoint or Excel.

When I hide Fonts, all MS Office applications stubbornly ignore this Windows setting though - making the feature quite useless (Office applications from at least one competitor do not have this problem BTW as they use the API properly). I searched for this topic and made sure that "hide Fonts based on regional settings" is ticked. However, it does not make any difference for MS Office. I tried this on several machines (Win 8.1 Home with Office 2013, Win 10 Pro with Office 2016) - always with the same result. In a word - this feature is not suitable to reduce the number of visible fonts, as MS Office does not seem to use the standard Windows API for displaying fonts in its applications.

MainType
MT has been offering groups for a long time, where you can load and unload a group of fonts. This does not solve the problem though, quite to contrary - the fonts are added to the already long list of installed fonts, bloating it even more. Of course you can unload the group comfortably from MT, but during use the list of fonts displayed in the menu of applications still is extremely long and can be very user-unfriendly IMO.

Possible solution
Provide an Add-in for MS Office (the most commonly used Office software) for use with MT. It could provide a workaround for the problem/phenomenon described above if it has the following capabilities:
  • A drop-down menu for fonts similar to the one provided by Office itself, but instead of showing all installed (or loaded) fonts, it shows only the fonts from groups that are currently loaded (or installed) through MT.
  • This could be either a continuous list of all fonts activated through MT, or one with with sub-headings for the individual groups.
This "MT font list" could then be used instead of the one from Word etc. Thus, by defining a groups of "standard" fonts, you could radically shorten the dropdown menu to an easily manageable number for everyday use and flexibly add more fonts from other groups as needed. This way, you could not only arrange fonts in groups just as you need them, but also add a managing option to simplify everyday use in another application (e.g. Word).

I have seen such application-specific add-ins from other software that simplifies their use in MS Office. Adobe Acrobat is one, but there are also others that provide such functions to hook into Office and make their functions easily accessible within Word (e.g. through a MT ribbon) and enhance overall usability.
Erwin Denissen
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Re: MS Office Add-in for MainType Font Groups

Post by Erwin Denissen »

I do think it is possible to make such plugin, but we stopped with our (Adobe) plugins years ago as it took too much time to keep them compatible with every new release of the external software.

With respect to fonts, Microsoft Office is rather outdated. That is mostly due to the fact they want to avoid re-flows of existing documents. I suspect at one point in the near future they will make more improvements, like full support for variable fonts. Hopefully they will then also improve the way you select fonts.
Erwin Denissen
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fontuser
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Re: MS Office Add-in for MainType Font Groups

Post by fontuser »

Erwin Denissen wrote: Sun Nov 27, 2022 9:11 am I do think it is possible to make such plugin, but we stopped with our (Adobe) plugins years ago as it took too much time to keep them compatible with every new release of the external software.
Thank you very much for the quick replay!
Is the SDK/API from MS Office similarly problematic or could it be realistic to do such an Add-in and keep maintenance requirements through the versions low and in the end provide such a functionality?
Last edited by fontuser on Sun Nov 27, 2022 9:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
Erwin Denissen
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Re: MS Office Add-in for MainType Font Groups

Post by Erwin Denissen »

We currently don't have the resources to make and maintain plugins, but MainType comes with a DLL that can be used by external parties to make such plugins. Let me know if this is something you would consider and I will send you more information.
Erwin Denissen
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fontuser
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Re: MS Office Add-in for MainType Font Groups

Post by fontuser »

Erwin Denissen wrote: Sun Nov 27, 2022 9:37 am We currently don't have the resources to make and maintain plugins, but MainType comes with a DLL that can be used by external parties to make such plugins. Let me know if this is something you would consider and I will send you more information.
Unfortunately my skills end at the user level, so I cannot do this myself. If I am able to locate someone with the necessary skills who is willing to do this, I'll get in touch for sure. Thanks again for the quick reply and the clarification of the potential and realities.
And out of curiosity: Which skills and knowledge should someone have to do such a plugin (just in case someone asks...)?
Erwin Denissen
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Re: MS Office Add-in for MainType Font Groups

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Our DLL can be used in all languages that supports DLLs. It depends on the external software what programming language can be used to make a plugin. For the Adobe plugins we used C in combination with the Adobe plugin framework.
Erwin Denissen
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Proven Font Technology
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