Ok folks, while I generally like the X Window System, I will be the first to admit that setting fonts has always been a major pain. It's one of those things in X where someone can always point at it and say “See, this is why X sucks!” Well, not for long. There's a new system being prepped for XFree86 4.3 and it's already somewhat in use for X 4.2. It's called fontconfig, and it will make things a whole lot simpler. Read on below.
Anyone who cut their teeth on setting up Linux boxes knows the tedious process of adding new fonts to X. There's FontPath lines you must add to the config file, and then you have to create a fonts.dir for each directory you have fonts in, and then you have to run xset to update the font table. Oh wait, did you make a fonts.scale file as well? Or are you using the X Font Server? Did you make sure you're loading the right handler lib for each type of font? AFM? TrueType? Did you clean out your Xftcache? Aaargh!