VERSIONS: Paradox 8 - Win 98
SUBJECT: Number of fonts installed
BY: DAN ALDER
Date: 27 May 1999
Paradox has traditionally had problems with some imperfectly written printer drivers, and you can run into the same sort of issues as occur
with an excess of fonts. HP drivers in the IV and 5 series seem to be the most problematic. We have attempted to address this issue as much as we
can with Paradox 9, and I believe that, for the most part, we have succeeded.
The fonts issue is actually related not to the actual number of fonts, but to the capabilities of the registry. The windows registry can only
handle a certain number of sub-keys and entries, and eventually you simply run out of room. The second issue is the size of the path name to the
fonts. Most are installed directly into the \windows\fonts directory, and have no path, so use up no more than 12 characters (8.3). Some programs,
however (many older Corel packages do this), put the fonts in a different directory and registered that location, which requires the full path. And a
few actually registered fonts in the fonts directory with a full path anyway, reducing the maximum font count. The maximum number is listed in
an article on Microsoft's Knowledgebase; I think it is 10 kilobytes of path and file names.
Ultimately this works out to somewhere between 500 and 1000 fonts, depending on whether or not they are registered with paths. 500 is
generally a safe number.
More information on this. A quote from the document
All font files are registered under a single key in the registry, and a registry key cannot exceed 64K. If font names average 20 characters in
length and font filenames average 10 characters in length, the maximum number of TrueType fonts you can install falls between 1000 and 1500. If a
TrueType font file is located in a folder other than the Fonts or the System folder, the full path to the font is included in the registry, using up more
space in the key and reducing the number of fonts you can install.
VERSIONS: Paradox 7 Runtime
OS: Windows XP Media Center Edition
BY: RANDY
Date: 24 September 2006
A Paradox 7 Runtime app which I've distributed for years, fails to open more than once on an HP XP multi-media machine. Attempts to restart the
app after closing, results in the brief appearance of the hour glass and then nothing happens. No error messages.
After restarting the computer, the app will again open -- once.
The problem was something I'd read about years ago, but not experienced until encountering two XP Media Center systems. Too many fonts.
The user had 1200+ in the windows font folder and more elsewhere. Reducing the C:\windows\font count to 750 solved the crashing
problem.
According to MS, the maximum count for the OS is dependant on the length of the font names, including path...so it varies.