fonts question

[Scott I. Remick]

I understand a lot of things, but fonts sometimes confuse me. This is one
of those times. I'm using FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE and XFree86 4.3.0.

Most of the time, my fonts are beautiful and anti-aliased. However, I
noticed some web pages some text wouldn't be. I narrowed down one site to
it listing "Lucida" in the fonts pref list, which I have as a PCF font. It
seems that PCF fonts are bitmap fonts... so that explains why it's not
anti-aliased.

An example would be:

<font face="Tahoma, Lucida, Helvetica" size="+2"><b>This text isn't
anti-aliased!</b></font>

(One quick solution here would be a way in Firebird to never use PCF fonts
when rendering pages... if someone knows the answer, please let me know.
This would be Question #1).

I use gnome (2.4), so I pulled up my font list to discover that "Lucida"
was a PCF font. I also saw that I had LucidaBright and LucidaTypewriter,
also PCF fonts. It occurred to me that maybe I could get the TTF "Lucida
Sans" font and put it on here. If so, Question #2 is: is there a way to
have X always substitute a font... in this case, Lucida Sans for any call
for "Lucida"? I would assume flat out turning off PCF fonts would be a Bad
Idea.

The plot thickens though. I launch OpenOffice 1.1 and guess what? I see
"Lucidasans", "Lucidabright", and "Lucidatypewriter" as VECTOR FONTS!
Truly they are working, as I tried applying them to some sample text and
made the point size huge. Yet these same fonts don't appear in AbiWord. So
question #3 is: What gives? Where's this Lucidasans vector font coming
from? How can I make it available to other apps, like Firebird and
AbiWord? And how can I make it get used before the PCF Lucida?

I know the page:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-fonts.html

...but it doesn't go this deep.

Any insight or help appreciated... thanks!