MacInTouch: saving drive space by removing non-english resources

It's not just about saving space on the drive, it's about saving backup storage and backup time! Also, if you don't use iWork, remember to delete the demo version that's installed on every Mac.

I wish Macintouch had permalinks, I'd prefer to link to them rather than quote so much.

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh:

David Turner offered this tip for saving disk space with iWork (which may be especially helpful with a small hard drive in a laptop Mac or Mini):

[David Turner] While copying Pages one day, I noticed it was copying a whole lot of files from /Applications/iWork\ \'06/Pages.app/Contents/Resources/German.lproj. I thought, why do I have these localization files? So I deleted all the various .lproj directories that are not English.lproj. Before I did this, Pages was some 800MB, and now it is only ~250MB. The same trick works for Keynote.

[John Horridge] David Turner's tip for saving disk space by deleting iWork language resources can be made much simpler than digging thru Contents/resources etc. Do Get info on Pages (or Keynote) and under 'Languages, delete the unwanted language resources. ..

[Jim Meiss] Regarding David Turner's remark about slimming down Pages and Keynote by removing any unneeded languages: An application like 'Monolingual' will do this on all of your applications automatically.

[Jim Coefield] Another tip for saving disk space from the multitudes of language resources that eat up disk space on smaller hard drives: use Macaroni. It is a System Preference-level tool that will remove whatever subset of localized resources that you want, and do it regularly (customizable schedule), so you don't have to worry about cleaning up after every little update you may do. Many applications have localized resources, and plowing through your applications to discover them all can be tedious. It has a 35 day free trial, so you can clean up your hard drive, and see if you like it...

I don't like installing system preference tools myself -- too likely to cause subtle bugs IMHO. I've used monolingual before and I may try it again ...