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I'm scrolling through miles of Indian, Tibetan, Arabic, Syriac, etc fonts looking for the ones I use
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Does Anything on a modern linux system use:

1. Type 1 Fonts?
2. 75dpi Fonts? (on 1600x900 screen here)
3. 100dpi Fonts?
4. Misc fonts? (looks like refugee keyboard 'Terminus' fonts)

I'm aware of things using OTF, & TTF fonts, Cyrillic, well either I want them or not. Local fonts I can imagine for local use. I made a directory tree in /usr/share/Foreign_Fonts and bundled most of them out of the way for the day when I might need them (I do occasional favours for a very multicultural bunch of folks) but I found myself wondering what uses these other ones still?

XTerm, rxvt, xmms and nedit are the ones that come to my mind.

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Right. I logged out of X, moved the 100dpi, 75dpi, Type1, & Speedo directories out of /usr/share/fonts, & restarted X. I would have moved Cyrillic as well, except I have no Cyrillic fonts

Xterm was the only one that concerned me, and there's always xine (which works) for xmms. Xmms worked - the fonts looked a little dodgy, but I use it so rarely I hardly care. I don't know if they were dodgy before. Xterm is on DejaVu Sans Mono with a UTF encoding, and that was unaffected. I imagine that's an OTF/TTF font anyhow. I have it as a TTF. The front end of xmms really needs a facelift. It seems built for a 320x240 screen, I have 1600x900 and many have hdmi or even 4k.

I don't have nedit. Rxvt comes up the size of a matchbox, uses some miniscule font and it's settings have eluded me to date. So I don't use it. Even my puny box can afford the 'bloat' of xterm.

There's also the tiny fixed size keyboard fonts for runlevel 3 which somehow ended up in /usr/share/fonts/misc even holding some antique IBM 3270 (green screen) terminal fonts, back from the days when IBM were still swinging from tree to tree I think they were stuck there by the terminus fonts package I installed. I'm sure they'd crash X if it ever managed to load one.

I conclude there is a lot of redundant fonts lying about, that one never needs to install 100dpi, 75dpi, Type1, or Speedo fonts ever again, and that the keyboard fonts can be reduced to one. The bulk of the work is done these days by OTF & TTF fonts. After all, this is the 21st century.

Some time in the past, I made the mistake of installing emacs (I'm no vi/vim fan either) but even that came up in X, but changing the font (like anything in emacs) is more than 5 seconds work. It seems fine in runlevel 3 mode, and seems to use the keyboard font. Maybe I should install xemacs; Maybe not - I should remove emacs.

Libreoffice (which started me on this trail) had hidden some of it's fonts (in Slackware anyhow) in /usr/lib64/libreoffice/share/fonts/truetype which housed OTF & TTF fonts. Once I weeded the undesirable menu entries, and added a few on my own, a few tasteful 'lndir' commands presented them in each place. I'm not going to pursue ghostscript fonts, or any others until I am taught a lesson in my own inadequacies by some package. I'm marking this solved, and will revisit and confess the error of my ways if need be.

EDIT: Errors of My Ways: xmms wants "-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-10-*" But xine doesn't bellyache.

I too have done a lot of font purging: LibreOffice can no longer user Type1, for example. But I steered clear of the bitmap fonts in sheer ignorance. Which ones are essential in the console?

It seems that all the bitmap fonts stored with the normal ones may be redundant. The console uses PSF fonts that live in a directory "consolefonts", buried somewhere in /lib or /usr according to taste.

The only one that used anything was xmms. I have xine, mplayer, xmms & vlc, which is definite overkill. Xine and Xmms should go. One only responds to Alsamixer. I never checked rxvt. Keep OTF & TTF.