Microsoft plans to move Fonts management from the Control Panel to the Settings application in future versions of the Windows 10 operating system.

Paul Thurott managed to get a sneak peak of the functionality already using the latest Windows 10 Insider Build.

According to his information, Fonts becomes an entry under Personalization in the Settings application.

Windows 10 users and admins get a list of available fonts when they open Fonts in the Settings. Search and filter options appear at the top of the screen; search does what you expect it to do and filter limits fonts to specified alphabets.

Fonts appear as the preview sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” so that you see right away how a font looks like.

There is a link to the Store at the top that opens the Fonts listing on Microsoft’s Store. It features a single font right now, likely to test functionality.

It highlights, however, that Microsoft will distribute fonts through the Store. That’s not necessarily a bad move considering that it guarantees that the font package is clean of viruses and other malicious code. While that is the case for most of the fonts offered on the Web, just like codec packs, font packs sometimes were distributed with malware.

Users who don’t want to use the Store have all classic options available to them. It is still possible to download fonts from the Web to install them manually.

The Fonts Settings page offers previews of individual fonts that you select. You can uninstall them directly from there, type custom characters for preview, or access font metadata.

Uninstall removes the font from the system. It seems likely that the functionality is limited to non-critical fonts just like it is not possible to remove some apps from Windows 10 devices using the Apps Settings page.

The classic font page in the Control Panel lists all installed fonts as well. Font previews are limited to three characters though and you need to click again to get a full preview of a font. It features no options to type custom text.

Closing Words

Microsoft has not announced the change yet. The Fonts Settings page looks complete though which means that there is a good chance for it becoming available in the next Windows 10 Feature update.