Traditionally, installing fonts on Linux meant creating directories, copying files, and refreshing the font cache. Today I discovered a neat Windows-y font installer in the form of the fonts URL scheme. Open the file manager to fonts:/ and installing fonts should be as easy as copy and paste; removing fonts is just as easy. Through this mechanism, one can manage both personal fonts and (with sufficient privileges) system fonts.
Excited about the discovery, I decided to have some fun. A while ago, I’d purchased a disc full of fonts. My Kubuntu setup comes with some 400 system fonts, but I wanted to find out just how many my laptop could handle. After I copied in several thousand TrueType and OpenType fonts, I fired up OpenOffice.org and the GIMP for a quick test. While OO.o was not able to use the OpenType fonts, everything was pretty smooth. But the real test was just about to begin. The disc included some 150000 font files, and I proceeded to install all of them.
At the moment I’m taking a break at 56398 fonts (4.0GB). It takes a couple of minutes to load the desktop after logging in, and many operations have slowed drastically. So uh… I guess installing lots of fonts does affect performance. It would be interesting to perform the same experiment on Windows and Mac OS X.
November 13th, 2008: I now have 124479 fonts (8.1GB) in my personal fonts directory; I figured this is as slow as I could tolerate, so I’m going to stop here and revert to the original state of zero fonts. That was fun!
Wow, that is a lot of fonts.
What one earth would you do with all those? Are they all different, or do you have ‘groups’ that are very similair?
Sorry to be prying, but it’s just very shocking, that’s all.
I might have 100 fonts, maximum. And I might have perhaps 11 that I’ve downloaded.
–Rine
Many of those are professional fonts that come with specialized bold and italic varieties, and some of these fonts are similar. When you do graphic design, you do make use of many different typefaces, some of which may have very subtle differences. An eighth of a million typefaces is overkill, though.
Check your fonts directory; you might find some specialized bold and italic typefaces too.
Wow! what an idea ! What a concept ! Beautiful .. Amazing