> My reply: I am more than willing to change my views when they are off base. > Unfortunately, > your last message is unhelpful.
For an application to be able to use the font it must be made aware of the font. Having each application always browse through a directory with 200+ fonts would make it VARY slow to bring up a font change dialog. So some kind of indexing is needed. Also, for many applications it is not enough to just know the font exists, since the application itself does not use the font directly. The application might say to another application (or even another part of itself) "using font foo, write letter A at this position and letter B at that position". To be able to calculate the correct positions the application must know the metrics of the font. And for that use to be efficient the metrics should be in an indexed file, so they need to be computed for all the glyphs in the font, not used the glyphs used in this particular text. And, as others have said, some applications come with fonts. To make sure they don't overwrite other fonts with the same name they all store their fonts in separate directories. In X11 there are for example different screen fonts for different DPI, there are 75 DPI fonts and there are (I think) 100 DPI fonts. They are in separate directories. /Peter
