[PLUG] Missing fonts in KDE and /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

[Phil Tomson]

A while back (in September) I upgraded my Mozilla to a later version (on 
Gentoo using emerge) and the fonts in KDE seemed to disappear after that 
(either I would see little empty squares where letters should be or menus 
were just empty).  I've been using ICEwm in the meantime and it seems OK.  
But I tried to run Lyx the other day and it could only find a fixed font...  
So now I'm motivated again to try to figure out what's going on.

I've looked around on the web and found a few suggestions that editing 
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf and changing the order that it searches font 
directories could help - but I haven't had luck with this.

Now I'm curious about fonts.conf - it's an xml file so I'm thinking that 
some program actually reads it at some point and does something with it.  
Does this happen once during booting or is it read all the time by 
various programs that need to find fonts?  Can anyone explain how 
fonts.conf is used?

Phil