"hermanmeester"
I installed the fonts (which are PostScript Type1 fonts) in the
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1
directory. First I just put the file, which was a tar.gz file, there as
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/culmus-0.101.tar.gz
This worked for a while. So I guess when importing the fonts, those files were automatically "unzipped"?
No, there is no automatic unpacking. This just cannot work. You should unpack the archive and copy the fonts to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/. By the way, you can also copy fonts into the ~/.fonts directory in the home directory of a user. This makes the fonts only available for that specific user, but it is often convenient for testing.
Later I installed a few Arabic Truetype fonts in the same way (except in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype of ocurse, but that didn't work. Apparently these were not unzipped ("de-compressed") automatically?
No, please uncompress the package and copy the fonts to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype, not the archive.
Can free fonts just "expire"?
No.
Then I also have some directory called
/usr/share/fonts/he/Type1
Here, "/he/" must stand for Hebrew. There, those fonts are also stored, I guess uncompressed.
That's why the Hebrew fonts worked for you although you copied only archive to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/. /usr/share/fonts is also searched by default by fontconfig. And, fontconfig searches recursively, i.e. all subdirectories of /usr/share/fonts are searched as well. The culmus-0.101.tar.gz in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/ of course could not work but as you say you had another copy of the uncompressed fonts somewhere below /usr/share/fonts, this explains why you could use these fonts.
I didn't make that directory, I don't know who did ;-)
SuSE doesn't create that directory either, that means you must have
created yourself somehow, maybe by unpacking a tar-ball or installing
a non-SuSE rpm package.
--
Mike FABIAN