Fedora – Improve the font rendering in Fedora

Fonts are stored in some various, known directories like ~/.fonts and /usr/share/fonts, usually. Any valid font file you put under one of these directories will show up in your applications' select a font kind of dialogs. A font manager application may possibly store font files in a directory that's known to it but not searched for fonts system wide, then create symlinks from these font directories to actual font files. When you enable a font, it may create a symlink, and remove it when you disable. In this wise, it does not need to remove font files from your filesystem and require you to reinstall every time you want them again.

Another approach may be moving font files from and to these font directories. Again, application has a directory known to it but not searched by system for fonts, and move files from this directory to a font directory to enable it and move it to it's own directory to disable it.

I don't have a clear idea about why your fonts get trashed though, but I may have guesses: An error by you, a bug in the program and/or many other possible facts. But I'd suggest managing fonts manually. The thing you have to do is, to move/symlink them to ~/.fonts directory to make them available, and move them away from this directory to make them unavailable. You may put them in some sort of my-fonts directory you choose (i.e. I put mine in ~/Dropbox/my/typeface/), and symlink to them from inside ~/.fonts when you want to enable, and still use those apps to simply view those fonts.

Subpixel smoothing can improve rendering slightly, but not 100% windows-like. Maybe you should try infinality patches?