All about fonts: any tutorials?

[Pseud]

I've spent a lot of time trying to "deuglify" fonts on my machine. There are a gazillion threads out here in this forum, a lot of which have helped somehow or the other. I *think* my fonts look ok now, although I occasionally run into webpages that are rendered hideous (This is one. I really don't read that newspaper, but it still bothers me that firefox doesn't show it like IE does.) I've not been able to do away with xfs, as many threads out there recommend, though ("xfs is deprecated, use xft and fontconfig"). I just use both; I think my fonts look uglier when i turn xfs off, so I've kept it. Acroread menus look ugly too. I use KDE, and most gtk applications show up with ugly fonts.
I want to start from scratch and solve all font related issues once and for all. I also want to learn about how fonts work.

Any pointers to tutorials or howtos would be great

Thanks!
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eschew obfuscation

[Skotlex]

If every app used font handling based off the X server's one, you wouldn't need to do a thing, just emerge the X server, emerge some font packages and it would all "work" on the fly (after setting the font directories), I agree that fonts are a big pile of a mess under Linux for the time being.
For example, I can't understand why we have font directories inside the X server config file (xorg.conf for me) AND under /etc/fonts/local.conf, that sounds like redundancy and bugs me to no end.
But it gets more interesting afterwards.. when you realize that programs like OpenOffice and FireFox like doing font rendering on their own... (or how Gnome and KDE try to make things easier by yet adding another layer over the X's font services) things really need to get standarized and it might be a while before that happens.
Anyway, my favorite thread on the whole font setup issue is this Mini-HowTo
There was another thread somewhere which had how to install over a hundred fonts... but that's another topic.