Fontconfig - Nov 2005 - Doc for fonts.conf? ("no fonts found error")

Around 10 o''clock on Feb 23, Laurent Moussault wrote:
> Is there any documentation for ''fonts.conf'' and about how
fontconfig
> finds font in the specified directories (e.g. what extension does it
> recongize, does it look into subdirs...)?
The fontconfig(3) man page is the only current documentation.  And, yes, 
fontconfig looks in subdirectories.  It relies upon FreeType2 to tell 
which files contains valid fonts, so any file FreeType2 can open, 
fontconfig will advertise.
> Or, is there a way to know what fonts the fontconfig library find
> (what is the algorithm used to browsed the directories specified in
> fonts.conf)?
Fontconfig comes with a diagnostic program ''fc-list'' which can
be used to
display the available fonts.

-keith

Hello,

Is there any documentation for ''fonts.conf'' and about how
fontconfig
finds font in the specified directories (e.g. what extension does it
recongize, does it look into subdirs...)?

Or, is there a way to know what fonts the fontconfig library find
(what is the algorithm used to browsed the directories specified in
fonts.conf)?

I just tried to install fcpackage.2_1.tar.gz (I tried the 2.0 version
as well), and then GTK+ 2.2.1.  But when I run an application compiled
with GTK (e.g. ROX-Filer), it crash with this error:

"No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig
library is not correctly configured. You may need to
edit the fonts.conf configuration file. More information
about fontconfig can be found in the fontconfig(3) manual
page and on http://fontconfig.org"

It''s not clear wether it is an error from the fontconfig library,
Pango, GTK or the application (and there is nothing in the manpage)...
The problem is, my environment is pretty standard (Slackware 8.0), and
I tried many_many_ different paths in fonts.conf, with no success...

regards,

PS: anyway, this is great to finally have a well-designed font
mechanism on unix!

-- 
Laurent Moussault