My upgrade to Slackware 10 went fairly smoothly last night and I seem to have most of the system back to normal - with the intended bonus that I now have a set of compatible and reasonably up to date libraries to build against.

The next task in my migration of an Access 97 application to Linux is to make more fonts available for printing from a couple of KDE applications.

I can't at the moment get my mind round where the fonts on the system come from as each application I run seems to have a different view of what's available. However the particular requirement at the moment is to get a decent looking sans-serif font for knoda to print with.

Many applications (and most of KDE) seem to have the Bitstream Vera font family available as screen and print fonts. However knoda doesn't show these as available, all it shows is an odd collection (from memory):- Courier Utopia Cursor Monospace a.n.other (Dingbats?)

In reality when I print anything in size 10 from knoda it looks like Courier to me.

I installed knoda using a Slackware package (i.e. it was pre-compiled in a .tgz file), could this be the problem? I.e. whoever built knoda and packaged it had a different set of fonts which don't match what I have? If so it's not a problem to build it myself.

As a more generic question it would be useful to know how applications decide what printer fonts are available. All the FAQs and HOWTOs I've looked at don't seem to address the issue of printer fonts at all, they seem to assume that once you can see the font on screen everything is done.