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Finding and removing Type 1 fonts on Windows

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Don J.
  • Updated

You may have heard Adobe began shutting down support for PostScript Type 1 fonts.

Starting with PhotoShop in the Fall of 2022 and now, in the Spring of 2023, support has been discontinued.

(If you haven’t, read this article.)

Most pundits agree that whither goes Adobe, others will follow (at least, font-wise). So look for Microsoft, Apple, Quark, Affinity, and others to eventually drop support for Type 1 fonts in their software. (This isn’t based on insider knowledge, just spidey-sense.)

And really, PostScript fonts have been “old school” for a long while. TrueType and then OpenType (which was co-developed by Adobe and Microsoft, which tells you a lot right there) have been dominant in everyday usage as well as production work since the early 1990’s. Thirty years or so.

We all know that PostScript fonts don’t offer color, embellishments, alternate characters, and especially Unicode support. Everyone has been on the OpenType bandwagon to some degree for a long time.

But you still might have PostScript fonts installed, and maybe you use them from time to time. And you may—horrors—still have documents that are using these older fonts.

In this article, we’re going to help you identify and remove PostScript Type 1 fonts from your Windows 10 and 11 systems.

If you are still running Windows 7 or 8, these processes should be similar.

Finding the Type 1 fonts

  1. Open the Fonts control panel.

    1. Right-click the Start menu (Windows 11: or Windows 10: ) and choose Run.

    2. Type c:\windows\fonts and press Enter.

  2. If the menu bar isn’t present near the top of the Fonts control panel window, click Organize, then choose Layout > Menu bar from the resulting menu.

  3. Choose View > Details, then choose View > Choose details.

  4. In the Choose Details dialog, check the box labeled Font type.

  5. Click the Font type text so that it’s highlighted.

  6. Click Move up until Font type is immediately below Name in the Choose Details dialog.

  7. Click OK.

    The Fonts control panel should display a list of installed fonts, with the Name column first, then the Font type column.

    Font types include OpenType, Raster, TrueType, and Type 1 (and possibly others).

  8. Click the Font type column header to sort fonts by their type.

  9. Click the header again so that the sort direction arrow is pointing down.

    The Type 1 fonts should be at or near the top of the list.

Suggestion: Print a sample

Before you remove your fonts, you might want to print a sample of each so that you can have something to compare against if you need to replace the font.

Tip: Use the Microsoft Print to PDF “printer” to save your samples as PDF files and save paper. (This works because Microsoft Print to PDF embeds the font in the PDF file, so you will be able to see the correct characters even after you remove the font.)

To print a sample:

  1. Double-click a font to display sample type.

    For fonts in a family (whose icon appears as a stack of cards in the Fonts control panel), double-click the family, then double-click an individual font.

    Windows font family

    Windows font

  2. Click Print in the font sample window.

  3. Select Microsoft Print to PDF (or a paper printer if you prefer).

  4. Click Print in the Print dialog.

Repeat these steps for each Type 1 font.

Removing the Type 1 fonts

We suggest that you make a backup of your fonts before removing them.

  1. Create a folder on the desktop with an appropriate name (“Type 1 backups”, for example).

  2. Select all the Type 1 fonts.

  3. Drag the selected fonts to the Type 1 backups folder.

  4. When you have copied the fonts, delete the selected fonts in the control panel.

  5. Close the Fonts control panel.

Look out for other users

There are two ways to install fonts on Windows: for just yourself, and for all users.

If you are the only user on your Windows system, then you shouldn’t have to worry about other users. But if there are other people who use different accounts on your PC, then you might consider checking their accounts to see if they have installed Type 1 fonts for just themselves.

The easiest way to do this is to have each user log in and follow the earlier steps for moving Type 1 fonts from the Fonts control panel.

If you are an administrator on the computer, then you can back up other users’ Type 1 fonts yourself.

Important: Don’t use this method to back up your own Type 1 fonts. By using the Fonts control panel, you will back up fonts available to all users and those that only you can access.

  1. Open a File Explorer window.

    Right-click the Start menu and choose File Explorer, or in Windows 11, click the File Explorer icon on the taskbar.

  2. In the path bar at the top of the window, type c:\users and press Enter.

  3. For each folder inside the Users folder, do the following (you can skip the Default, DefaultAppPool, and Public folders):

    1. Double-click a user folder.

      If Windows reports that you don’t have permission to access the folder, click Continue. If Continue isn’t an option, then it’s likely that your account isn’t an administrator account, and you’ll have to get some help from your company’s computer guy.

    2. Click in the path bar at the top of the window.

      (It will say something like “This PC > Local Disk (C:) > Users > User Name” before you click, then “C:\Users\user” after you click in the path bar.)

    3. Move the cursor to the end of the path, type \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts then press Enter to directly open the user’s Fonts folder.

      (Tip: Copy the text above from the first “\” through the “s” in “Fonts” then paste it after the text in the path bar.)

    4. Sort the folder by Type to identify the files to move. You want all the files of type “PFB File” and “Type 1 Font file”.

      (On Windows, Type 1 fonts consist of two files with the same names but different extensions. If you show file extensions you can see that the extensions are .PFB and .pfm.)

    5. Make a folder on the desktop named “<user> Type 1 backups”.

    6. Select all the Type 1 files (all the .PFB and .PFM files) in the user’s Fonts folder, then hold down the Ctrl key and drag the files to the “<user> Type 1 backups” folder.

      (Pressing Ctrl while you drag copies the files rather than move them.)

      Important: You shouldn’t delete another user’s Type 1 files. Font information is stored in the Windows registry. If you delete font files from the File Explorer, the user’s font information will be corrupted. Do let them know that you have backed up their Type 1 fonts.

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