Font name caching in suntools?

Roy Smith roy%phri at uunet.uu.net
Sat Jun 10 07:59:13 AEST 1989


I just noticed something strange about suntools fonts.  I wanted to make a
new version of the default font, screen.r.13 (I was doing some ascii
graphics and needed a slantier backslash).  I copied screen.r.13 from the
/usr/lib/font/fixedwidthfonts directory to my own, ran fontedit on it,
changed the backslash to my liking, and saved the font.  Then I did
"shelltool -font ./screen.r.13" and got the old font.  I think what is
happening is that suntools caches fonts based on the last component of the
path name.  All I needed to do was "mv screen.r.13 foo; shelltool -font
foo" and I got what the new font.  In fact, I could link foo to
screen.r.13 (either hard or symbolic) and if I used the screen.r.13 name,
I got the old font and if I use the foo name, I got the new font.
Clearly, suntools is caching fonts and keying on the filename.

This may be a nice efficiency hack, but it's not documented anywhere (that
I can tell).

-- 
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy at alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"



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