Fonts: Questions, doubts, uninstalling & Packages

[MatiasE]

Hi everyone! Thnx in advance for your help. I'm enjoying quite a lot my new Zorin, being an Ubuntu user for years all the problems are quite easy to solve... BUT I can't understand the fonts used and installed in Zorin.

I was with a new doc in Writer and wanted to use or try a new font and just discovered that Zorin pre-installs hundreds -literally- in worldwide formats/alphabets
I can understand that Zorin tries to make it easier so you don't have to tweak or install anything after, but now I have to scroll between hundreds of symbols that I will never use. I don't exaggerate I scrolled minutes with the mouse :')

I've set the OS installation in English, with latin-american keyboard & 'locale' from Argentina... so, why?
No disrespect at all, same thing should happen to anyone that doesn't use 'ABC', or 'á', or what a 'Ñ' is.

Now I want to remove them but couldn't find easy advice. In general they say: go to the fonts folder, delete it, rebuild fonts cache.

But in my usr/share folder I have like +4 different fonts folders, with sub-folders, one containing 413 items, with all kinds of formats which may include system files: otf, ttf, .uuid, afm, t1, woff, etc, etc

Also one type of font called "noto" -with hundreds of variations- is installed as a package, so I don't know if I can just remove it.

Sorry for being this long

Is there any way to remove all non 'ABC' fonts without deleting anything wrong?

Thank you again for your patience and help!

[Aravisian]

You can use the terminal and apt to remove fonts, so you do not need to worry about manually deleting files.

Fonts That Are Generally Safe to Remove

These fonts take up space and are only useful if you type or display text in these languages. If you use only Latin-based languages (like English, Spanish, French, etc.), you can remove:

fonts-noto-cjk (Chinese, Japanese, Korean support, ~150 MB)

fonts-unfonts-core (Korean fonts)

fonts-lohit-* (Indic scripts)

fonts-smc-* (Malayalam script)

fonts-samyak-* (Devanagari, Gujarati, Tamil)

fonts-arphic-* (Chinese and Arabic fonts)

fonts-kacst-* (Arabic)

fonts-sil-* (Various scripts, including Hebrew)

Decorative Fonts:
Zorin OS includes some decorative or less commonly used fonts. If you don’t need them for design work, you can remove:

fonts-cantarell (GNOME UI font, used only in GNOME)

fonts-comfortaa (Rounded display font)

fonts-roboto (Google's default font)

Redundant or Alternative Fonts
Some fonts duplicate the function of others. If you don’t use specific alternatives, remove:

fonts-noto-extra (Additional Noto fonts that aren’t necessary for Latin script users)

fonts-noto-ui-core (UI-specific fonts, unless needed)

Fonts You Should not Remove

Avoid removing core system fonts, as they are required for UI elements and applications to function properly:

fonts-dejavu-core (Essential for UI elements)
fonts-freefont-ttf (Used in various apps)
fonts-liberation (Replacement for Windows fonts like Arial and Times New Roman)
fonts-noto-core (Basic Noto fonts, used by many apps)
fonts-ubuntu (Default Zorin UI font)

You can use sudo apt remove --purge to remove the fonts. You also can stack the font names, with one space between each name to remove them all at once.
For example:

sudo apt remove --purge fonts-noto-cjk fonts-unfonts-core fonts-lohit-* fonts-smc-* fonts-samyak-* fonts-arphic-* fonts-kacst-* fonts-sil-* fonts-cantarell fonts-comfortaa fonts-roboto fonts-noto-extra fonts-noto-ui-core

[MatiasE]

Thank you, Aravisian! ¡Gracias! (Yes, we do use the " ¡ " haha)
Couldn't find something like this!

One more question: After removing the first packages I can see a warning that the folder could not be deleted because it was not empty. Indeed a ".uuid" file is left there.
I assume that I can safely delete that file and folder, is that correct?

[Aravisian]

@MatiasE

I assume that I can safely delete that file and folder, is that correct?

Yes, you can. The size those take up are in the kilobyte range, however - extremely small. They are left in case it turns out you need to reinstall that item.
So whether you want to go full cleaning or not depends on your confidence that you will never need those fonts.

[MatiasE]

Well... I need more help!

Your advice was great. I removed everything (except the 'Decorative') & several fonts were deleted.. BUT it's not enough.
There are still A LOT of non latin fonts installed, again hundreds
As you can see in the screenshot in fonts selection in Writer there are more non-latin than latin fonts to choose and there's a folder 'noto' with +800 archives
Do you have any other ideas on how to remove/delete them?
Thanks again!

[Aravisian]

@MatiasE

As you can see in the screenshot in fonts selection in Writer there are more non-latin than latin fonts to choose and there's a folder 'noto' with +800 archives
Do you have any other ideas on how to remove/delete them?

At that point, we begin entering risky territory.

Before proceeding, given that they do not take up very much space at all, I must ask about the necessity.
A lot of universal compatibility stuff is included in an operating system. While digging through a fonts list may make the superfluous fonts seem stark - unless you having to sift through it a lot for projects or work; they really are harmless.

[MatiasE]

Thank you (again & as always ) for your answers!

I agree with you, it's not about the space and of course they're not a risk at all, BUT as you correctly guessed my work is about writing and choosing the right typography is important.
So, at this point, what can I do? As you can see in this screenshot, sorted by name, all the (ie) 'thai' fonts are together.
May be just what I said in my original post, "go to the fonts folder, delete it, rebuild fonts cache"?

[Aravisian]

@MatiasE

my work is about writing and choosing the right typography is important.

Removing fonts individually can be risky since some are dependencies for other packages. If you are planning on going that route, I think you need to first set aside what you need to keep:

• fonts-dejavu-core
• fonts-liberation2
• fonts-noto-core (this one does include Lao and others. If you are really eager and want to accept some risks, I will include this below)

To slim down the Noto Family:

sudo apt remove fonts-noto-extra fonts-noto-ui-core fonts-noto-ui-extra fonts-noto-color-emoji fonts-noto-mono fonts-noto-sans fonts-noto-serif

I noticed in your screenshot that Arabic under noto was still shown. But above, we covered that. Let's revisit that a moment (copy and paste this exactly, in order to avoid confusing apt):
sudo apt remove --purge fonts-noto-cjk fonts-unfonts-core 'fonts-lohit-*' 'fonts-smc-*' 'fonts-samyak-*' 'fonts-arphic-*' 'fonts-kacst-*' 'fonts-sil-*'

---

Taking a risk, you can remove the Noto-Core package which includes Lao, shown in your screenshot:

sudo apt remove fonts-noto-core

I would set a .txt file aside which has sudo apt install fonts-noto-core command retained that you can reference if there are any UI breaks that show up later on this one. You probably won't need to...