On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 18:58, David C. Rankin <drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:

Listmates,

       Picking through the font configuration, I have run across a curiosity, why do the font directories have both a fonts.dir file and a fonts.scale file. The page: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg_Font_Configuration suggests that you run mkfontscale and mkfontdir on each of the directories. The related files fonts.scale and fonts.dir are the same:

[20:52 supersff:/etc/fonts] # l /usr/local/share/fonts/ <snip> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  43730 2009-04-28 20:52 fonts.dir -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  43730 2009-04-28 20:52 fonts.scale

[20:52 supersff:/etc/fonts] # diff /usr/local/share/fonts/fonts.dir /usr/local/share/fonts/fonts.scale

       Why do we need both?

-- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com

Scalable fonts do not usually include the X font name, so the file fonts.scale is used to name the scalable fonts in the directory. Alongside it, fonts.dir is a list of all the fonts in the directory - including the scalable ones. If you only have scalable fonts in the directory, then yes, the files will be identical. ~celti