Craft Edge

Is it necessary to first install fonts to use them? I believe I had a demo of SCAL 1.6 and I could point the pgm to a fonts directory and it would read in the TTF files. More often than not, the fonts I would want to use in SCAL are not those I would want to have generally available (halloween digbats for instance).

You can use a program called The Font Thing - a free download. You can then use this program to "load" the font you want - it will stay available until you shut down your computer. you just save fonts into any folder and then while in The Font Thisng program, direct it to that folder and "load" the font you want. That way it does not have to be installed in your fonts folder

I just save all my downloaded fonts onto a usb stick...

You don't need to use a font manager or even unzip the fonts if you don't want to. I save most of my font downloads to a folder instead of installing them. Then when I want to use one, I just open the zip folder, open the font, and then the program that I want to use it in (usually Inkscape). The downside of this is that if you open a file later without having the font open, the wrong font will be used (unless you converted to Path in Inkscape). HTH