Ximian OpenOffice symbol font - again!?

[mangobrain]

Right.
I just emerged ximian-openoffice-1.1.50. It compiled straight off, which was a start - but when opened, the symbol font (OpenSymbol) wasn't there, for whatever reason.

So I did a bit more investigating.

Browsing "fonts:///" with Nautilus, it didn't show up. But browsing it as root instead of my normal user, I noticed the item count in the left pane was 1 higher, the extra item being the elusive OpenSymbol.
fc-list as normal user didn't contain OpenSymbol - as root, it did. fc-cache didn't want to pick up on its presence, either - again, absolutely fine as root!

AFAIK, I've got one copy of opens___.ttf in /opt/Ximian-OpenOffice/share/fonts/truetype/ and one in /usr/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/. Checked the permissions on both, and they're world-readable. I'm not running XFS (it *is* installed, for whatever reason, but not started).

Eventually, I looked in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and noticed that "~/.fonts" is scanned by fontconfig. So I made a .fonts directory for the non-root user I want to run OpenOffice as, put a third copy of opens___.ttf in there, and ran fc-cache -v. This worked!

But I'm not happy. Why did this work? Why did nothing else work? Why, oh why, is the font perfectly visible to root, but not visible to a normal user until specifically installed in the home directory!?

Additionally....
1. What's likely to have installed xfs? If I don't run it, will unmerging it break anything?
2. Where are the REST of my fonts in OO? Running Gnome's font configuration app still returns more than are present in OO's list, even though now are both happy to list OpenSymbol. (To be honest, I'm not that bothered about this one, just curious.)

[Halanegri]