How to Show or Hide Fonts in Windows 8 / 8.1

Windows 8 (and its later incarnation 8.1) comes prepacked with many different fonts for many languages like Japanese, Khmer, Hebrew, Arabic and more. Based on your input language preferences, most of these fonts are hidden by Windows as they are not required. For example, if you have selected the US English as your input language then you will not be using the Khmer or Hebrew fonts, so Windows hides them from being used by any of the editor programs. But if you want to use any of these hidden fonts, you can easily show them so that they become visible to any of the editor programs that you may be using.

You can follow these simple steps to show or hide fonts in Windows 8 or 8.1:

  1. Press the hotkey Win+R to open the Run dialog. Type fonts in the Run dialog and press Enter. This will open the Fonts folder. You can also open this folder by opening C:\Windows\Fonts in the File Explorer directly.Show or Hide Fonts in Windows 8
  2. In this Fonts folder you would see all the installed fonts on your Windows computer. All the fonts are listed alphabetically and you can see their names, designers, languages they are designed for and so on. The hidden status of each font is also displayed. If you find a hidden font that you want to make visible, then you can select it and click on the Show in the toolbar. You can also right-click on that font and choose Show from the context-menu that appears.Show or Hide Fonts in Windows 8
  3. The procedure for hiding a unnecessary font is similar. In order to hide a visible font, you can right-click on it and choose Hide from the context-menu.

The more fonts you make shown to your operating system, the more memory is consumed as each of these fonts get loaded at Windows boot. So you have to be careful not to show all the fonts and hide all those fonts that you are not going to use.