What would be the best way to keep the fonts I install separate from those which come with Slackware? I want to install a whole bunch of fonts for some graphic design testing - but ideally I'd rather not mix them with those already in /usr/share/fonts/TTF (the new ones are TTF fonts) - so that I can easily remove them later. Would creating a separate dir under /usr/share/fonts be acceptable?

I think ~/.local/share/fonts is the standard place for that.

For years I have stored mine in /usr/local/share/fonts.

That. Or build a Slackware package.

Speaking of which is there a easy way to check which fonts are default Slackware installed, because dummy me a year ago copied a few foreign script fonts over to the default TTF dir and now I cant tell which from which out the standard Liberation, Deja Vu font and such

I've asked myself the same question. I suppose the date of the font files might be a giveaway - if you can remember roughly when you've installed the new fonts.

I was under the impression that Slackware doesn't really tend to use /usr/local. But I could be wrong :-)

It generally isn't used with packages, so scripts from SBo don't use it. But if you need to add something specific to your machine, /usr/local/ is designed just for that.

Grep /var/log/packages for /usr/share/fonts, and compare that to what's in fc-list?

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Note bassmadrigal's response. Also this -- one of my pet peeves is when upstream packagers and distro maintainers place their system files in my /usr/local/.

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Just so you know, FHS 2.2 has been superseded in favor of FHS 3.0.

Unfortunately, the language isn't specific enough in the FHS to make it definitive on what should go where. Some believe that only files from the OS should go there and all 3rd-party, whether packaged or self-compiled, should go in /usr/local/, while others believe that any packages should go in /usr/ and any self-compiled should go in /usr/local/.

I fall under the second group... specifically that files that are tracked by the package manager should go in /usr/ and files that won't be tracked (self-compiled, scripts, random system fonts, etc) should go in /usr/local/.

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This.

For reference, all you need to do is create a file called /etc/fonts/local.conf

And put the following in it:

Copy your font files into /usr/local/share/fonts and run fc-cache. Job done.

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I even use a third method: big packages (that aren't _slackware_ packages), like Maple, GNU Octave etc go under /opt/<package_name> - with bin, lib and such under there:
/opt/octave:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 304 2018-05-25 12:48:48 bin
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 80 2018-05-25 12:48:46 include
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 80 2018-05-25 12:48:46 lib
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 2018-05-25 12:48:46 libexec
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 152 2018-05-25 12:49:00 share
and special startup scripts will add the needed directories to PATH, MANPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc.

This /opt can get rather big when you've got lots of third-party software:
/dev/sda2 11074 5063 6012 46% /opt
(in MB blocks). As you see I made it into its own partition.

Thank you - all very straightforward!

This is what I do.