I spent some time thinking about writing a Linux font management tool that can inspect all fonts in a given directory and preview them (like gfontview, which appears to be defunct unfortunately) and also enable/disable sets of fonts, probably by linking them into ~/.fonts and running the fc-cache program. There are some bits missing, but I think I can begin to see how to get something HIGgish. One rather hackish approach is to copy ~/fonts.conf and add an entry for ".", so that the installer can examine the current directory; I want to use the same rendering routines for installed and non-installed fonts, of course.

A danger is that badly formed fonts can cause weird problems - e.g. I found the "save as" dialogue not working in gtk programs a day or two ago, and it seemed to be because of a bad TrueType font.

Also thought about what it would take to add some XPath support to my text retrieval package, but came to the same conclusion I did last time I thought abuot this: it would take more time than I have available for hacking on it, unfortunately.

I wonder if the people doing SVG drawing tools have looked at Visual Thought? This was a vastly overpriced diagramming tool for Solaris, and also available for Windows. You can download it for free now, although it's still closed source. I used to like its connection smarts as I recall.

On a rather different topic, I finaly decided to make public a Web page that I made a year or two ago, One In Christ, about tolerance. It also has the Sponsored Bible: what would it be like it corporations could sponsor words and phrases in religious texts? It's actually slightly scary.