[Fontconfig] Font availability issues

[Tom]

Hey all,

I recently switched to Slackware 9. Until then, I used Debian, so never 
really had to bother with fonts. For one reason or another, they 
always looked beautiful everywhere :-)

Now, however, I can't seem to get it right. I downloaded some TrueType- 
and other fonts, placed them in some directories under 
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, ran mkfontscale & mkfontdir in each of them 
and added those directories to XF86Config.

When I restarted X, "xlsfonts" correctly listed all my fonts, so I 
thought things were settled. But they aren't, as you might have 
guessed by now :-) GTK apps (Abiword, Mozilla & the like) do have 
anti-aliasing (although I guess that is being taken care of by XFree 
4.3.0), but their font listing has a mere 10 different fonts, all of 
which are just defaults (I mean: the ones I downloaded aren't listed).
Qt-apps *do* have the fonts listed, but they aren't displayed: whatever 
name I point to, it's just some ugly default sans-serif thingy.

Someone on some newsgroup advised me to create ~/.fonts/ as a symlink 
to the main font-directory, but that didn't help.

I browsed this list's archives, read somewhere I should execute 
"fc-cache -f -v" as root *and* as myself, the first goes okay, the 
latter causes some repeated output looking like this:

fc-cache: "/home/tom/.fonts/varia": caching, 74 fonts, 0 dirs
Can't save cache in "/home/tom/.fonts/varia"

I guess the cache can't be saved because the directory is just a 
symlink to a dir I have no writing permissions on. Moreover, some 
other directories, which sure do contain fonts, read "caching, 0 
fonts, 0 dirs". 

Then again: if "fc-list" correctly lists all fonts and if the same goes 
for "xlsfonts" - what else could I do?

I appreciate any pointers, hints or - even - solutions... :-)

Greets,
Tom

-- 
np: Les Joyaux de la Princesse - Terrorisme Islamique