Re: Best way to remove extra Microsoft fonts?

Hi Zack:

I understand the problem, trust me. I am on an iBook here, and they're
slugs :-) If you are on a portable, one thing that helps a LOT is to go
into System Preferences/Energy Saver/Options and set Processor Performance
from "Automatic" to "Highest". Yes, you will roast your gonads if you use
the thing on your lap, but keeping that processor blazing away makes things
quite a bit more responsive!

You have an adequately-specified system there: a gig of memory is the thing
that makes the real difference with substantial applications, particularly
on a machine with a slow motherboard like the iBook. You got the faaaast
one, this slug is only a 1.2 GHz :-)

Please try to implement the things Beth has suggested: they make a big
difference to your sanity. Allow me to add a few more:

1) It's not possible to prevent automatic pagination in Word, so stop
futzing with that control, which does nothing :-) Word has to paginate the
document so it knows where to put things. The pagination engine is thus
running all of the time, whether the control is on or off :-)

2) Get into Word>Preferences>View and kill Live Word Count. That is a
substantial power hog, put there for lawyers who have to hit an exact word
limit in some US courts. For the rest of us, File>Properties>Statistics
will give you a word-count every time you save the document. It's not as
accurate (it counts ALL of the characters in the document, compared to Live
Word Count which omits things the courts do not count, and it updates only
when the file is written to disk) but it's a lot less power-hungry :-)

Now: Here's where complications begin ... The most important point I can
make about Mac Office performance is that it "seems" slower than it "is".
The difference between seeming responsive to the user, vs actually getting
work done!

I can try to explain this, but I may not succeed in making it clear :-) Of
course, you may not be interested: in which case, do yourself a favour and
stop reading now :-)

Microsoft Word is an "Idle Loop Processor". The original architecture of
the application goes back to MS DOS/Windows 3.1/Mac OS earlier than 10.
These operating systems were essentially "single-tasking". They relied on
"co-operative" multitasking -- each application returning control to the
system when they had finished what they were doing. Then along came Windows
and OS X... If you put an application designed for the old systems on
Windows or OS X, it takes over the entire system and everything else stops
until that application has finished whatever it wanted to do. This is not a
"pleasant" experience for the user.

To overcome that, you either completely redesign the application, or you
cheat. Completely re-designing the application is woundingly expensive:
think $2,000.00 for a copy of Word -- literally. One way to cheat is to
create two "threads". One sits in the foreground listening for keystrokes
and queuing them. That's all it does. The other sits in the "Idle Loop" --
it runs only when the system announces that it has nothing else to do. It
contains almost the entire Microsoft Word application :-) That way, you do
not have to completely re-write the 30 or 40 million lines of code that make
up Microsoft Word, you can use the old design, but at the same time, it
doesn't take over the entire resources of the system for minutes at a time.

This was such a good idea that nearly all companies that make software for
Mac OS X or Windows use this design. Some brave companies try to produce
software with the more modern "multi-threaded" design. In that design, the
application is divided up into many little pieces, each of which operates as
if it were an independent program. Making such software is seriously
difficult. You have to do the same amount of work needed to "write one
program", but do it maybe 30 times over, to write 30 different pieces.
Worse: you get the same chance of having a bug multiplied by 30. You get
30 times the testing problems. 30 times the debugging problems. And a
whole new range of "timing" problems along the lines of "If I want to work
on this part of a document, how do I know that the various other threads
have completed their work? Can I rely on this text not being changed while
I am trying to work on it?" The problem is so great that I am not aware of
any multi-threaded application of any considerable size that has succeeded
commercially on personal computers yet. There are some coming: the
Government buys them. With our money... Nobody else can afford them!

Accepting for a moment that Idle Loop design is a good idea, this has some
major effects on how the application behaves. Remember that it must wait
for the System to announce that it has "nothing to do" before our
application does *anything*? So the first effect of this design is that
there will be a pause, often noticeable, before Word responds to your input.
The more applications you have running, the longer that pause will be. The
system goes into its idle loop, then calls each waiting application in turn,
waits for it to complete what it wants to do, then calls the next. If you
have ten applications running, you will wait ten periods before each action.

However, once your application makes it into the CPU, it gets the full power
of the machine and things happen quite briskly! So the first thing you have
to get used to is that Word "appears" slower than it actually is, because
for everything it does, it has to wait to be able to start. Microsoft put
quite a bit of work into performance in the latest iteration: if you have
applied the latest service pack, it actually moves along quite well once it
gets going :-)

Knowing how it works, you can do some things to help. You have already done
one of them: put plenty of memory in your computer. The most important
condition is that when the application gets the green light, it is actually
ready to start. If both it and its data are in memory at the time, it can
begin processing instantly. If anything has to come off the disk before
work can begin, the thing will be slower than molasses in winter...

Learning to stop applications you don't intend to use for a while is another
one that will speed things up. Experienced Mac users leave everything
running: that's how "Old Mac" operating systems ran best. Under OS X, it's
still fine to do that: it won't cause any problem, but remember that at some
level the pool of available system resources is divided by the number of
running applications. Learning to close all the files from idle
applications will give you a small boost in the responsiveness of the
application you actually want to "use". Stopping applications you are not
using will make a further small improvement.

Another thing you can do is get out of the habit of sitting there with your
fingers on keys while you're thinking. Remember there is a foreground loop
listening for keystrokes? If you sit there holding down the Control or
Command keys while you think, you are generating a constant stream of
"keystrokes". Each one must be assessed, processed, and queued before the
system gets into the idle loop. Another thing you could do if you could be
bothered is click the mouse! I won't go into why, but this generates a
high-priority interrupt that the system then discovers requires "no action".
But on the way back, the system goes back to the list of waiting
applications and takes the one at the top, the "foreground application".
The foreground application will be Word. So each time you click the mouse,
Word gets a green light :-)

Sadly, none of the above makes up for the fact that Microsoft Office was
"designed" for a much more powerful computer than this iBook :-) I can tell
you that on a 3.6 GHz dual processor with 2 GB of memory, a fast SCSI RAID-5
disk and an 800 MHz motherboard, Microsoft Office is quite useable :-)

OK, so the Tax Department paid for the abovementioned. *I* paid for the
Mac. We all understand *that* performance consideration, right? :-)

Cheers

On 13/12/05 2:54 AM, in article
1134402879.060209.255960@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Zack"
<asdfi23453@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] wrote:
>> Once you know it well, you can of course get away with all sorts of cunning
>> trickery. But a few users have discovered that if you get it even slightly
>> wrong, you end up with a highly unstable system that takes months to debug
>> and fix.
>>
>> Fonts are a legendary source of trouble. This is one of the reasons
>> Microsoft keeps three copies on your system :-) The various applications
>> require certain fonts to be there, and you'll live in crash-city if they're
>> not :-)
>>
>> Assuming that your system currently has fewer than about 500 fonts loaded,
>> optimising the Microsoft fonts might save you 40 MB of disk space. Your
>> system won't run any quicker. But it may be a lot quicker to crash. You
>> may get compatibility hell with documents from other sources. And Unicode
>> may not work right so you will get missing font problems.
>>
>> This is one area in Microsoft Office administration where errors hurt. :-)
>> Just a word to the wise... :-)
>>
>
> OK, I think I get the message: Don't mess with Microsoft! It's
> annoying to see all those fonts I'll never use cluttering up my font
> menu, but I'll live with it. My main concern was that Word 2004 seems
> a bit sluggish (even though I've turned off the obvious cpu-hogs such
> as automatic pagination and status bar) and I thought slimming down the
> fonts might help, but I gather from the above messages this is probably
> not the case. Incidently, I'm using OSX 10.3.3 on a 1.3Ghz G4 with
> 1.25 gig of RAM.
>
> Zack
>

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

.

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