Best Practices - Fonts

My 2 questions (according to my logic) should not be OS dependent but they very well might be.

Windows out-of-the-box comes with its share of Fonts as does just about any productivity applications MS and Non-MS alike also do that get installed to \Windows\Fonts. They get installed with any combination of File Attributes including no attributes set at all; I.E. Hidden / System / Read only / (or just nothing).

My questions are ,
1. Is it OK or even preferable to make ALL font files in \Windows\Fonts <Read-only>?
2. If I was to Unhide all fonts or make all fonts read-only, might it cause some of the font files to misbehave or break?

I'm a creature of the level playing field. Any reason to standardize pretty much anything is my goal, and it has bugged me for quite a while to see hundreds of Font files in the Fonts directory with attribute settings set in combinations that are all over the map. I'm going through a major Font audit right now and my client has users with literally thousands of fonts just about everywhere, when you take into consideration that there are older and newer versions of the same fonts scattered on machines all over the LAN.

This applies to Windows XP SP-3, Windows 7 and Windows 10 Pro Ver-20H2.

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.

Kevin

I don't think that the changes you've suggested will accomplish anything. Or, more importantly, what do you -desire- to happen? I can't think of any applications that would do anything other than add new fonts.

'Speed freak' that I am, I've gone so far as to actually delete fonts from Windows. Various foreign language fonts that I will never use are my primary targets. Doing so requires taking ownership first. Also, some of Microsoft supplied fonts are in 'families', so deleting one may delete the family. I've deleted their references from the registry as well.

On the other hand, various application programs add their own fonts that are not put into some folder other than C:\Windows\Fonts folder (probably for simplicity with various non-Windows OS's). It's also possible to download hundreds, if not thousands of additional fonts for a fee.

In short, while fonts may be easily added, there is no reason to make them 'read only'. Neither the fonts within C:\Windows\fonts nor those in C:\Windows\Boot\Fonts are NOT marked read only. If Microsoft doesn't make it's fonts read only, why would we?

This is precisely what font organizing tools are for. I use NexusFont myself. It lets me organize my fonts into folders and only use those folders of fonts that I need for my workflow that day.