[arch-general] Why both fonts.dir and fonts.scale?

[Celti]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 18:58, David C. Rankin
<drankinatty at 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