Solved View fonts by date installed

Hi all,
Windows seems to make it impossible to sort fonts by date installed. If you open C:\Windows\Fonts, explorer switches to the control panel page for fonts. There you can optionally display Date modified and Date created, but both are utterly useless. Date created is always blank, and Date modified actually shows the Date Accessed from the details pane. See screenshot. To make things worse, it changes this date (for most or all of the fonts) every time I install a font. Or at least I think that's what it does. The Date Modified seems just bogus (1996 ? WTF ???). Cripes, there is so much wrong with this I find it hard to describe clearly... it just looks a total mess.

I can appreciate that perhaps Windows does not remember when a font was installed (or does it?). In that case, the next best thing would be to show the Date Created, which would work for me as I always install a font directly after downloading it. But that value seems to be ignored here. Actually I mostly use AMP Font Viewer but alas that program lacks an option to sort fonts by date or otherwise. I wonder if there exists a font viewer that can do this, or if I should attempt to write my own. Mostly I wonder why MS makes simple things so difficult and opaque....

I don't know about doing that in GUI (using the mouse), but you can do it in Command Prompt like in the old DOS days. I am not sure if the parameters still apply, but using the dir command there you could sort with the /o parameter. Try this code:

to sort the fonts folder by date.

Custom fonts are located in the "C:\Users\<your_name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts" directory and it might look like this

spapakons said:

I don't know about doing that in GUI (using the mouse), but you can do it in Command Prompt like in the old DOS days. I am not sure if the parameters still apply, but using the dir command there you could sort with the /o parameter. Try this code:

Code:

c:
cd \
cd windows
cd fonts
dir /w/p/o:d

to sort the fonts folder by date.

Click to expand...

Thanks, that was worth a try. Often the good old command tools are more sensible than the gui stuff. Sadly though, I cannot make head or tails of the sorting. Windows seems unable/unwilling to sort the fonts in any sensible order, and the dates are just as unreliable as in explorer.

abactuon said:

Custom fonts are located in the "C:\Users\<your_name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts" directory and it might look like this

Click to expand...

Now this is extremely useful. Thanks so much ! I had not realized that all my fonts (or at least the ones I am seeing in AMP Font Viewer as far as I can see) are in that location. There, indeed, the dates shown by Windows Explorer look to be correct (although, having said that, look at this screenshot )


Luckily the date modified does not interest me, so it looks like I can take it from here, and just forget about this crummy Control Panel Fonts thingy. Thanks again !

cbreemer said:

(although, having said that, look at this screenshot )
View attachment 112862

Click to expand...

Welcome to the future.
Coincidently, I was actually born in 2107

antspants said:

Coincidently, I was actually born in 2107

Click to expand...

So you have a negative age?

Rollback_Jockey said:

So you have a negative age?

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Yes. When the Bible (Part 2) is scribed, today will be written as “83 years before antspants”

I better mark the problem solved before this thread gets out of hand