Gnome fonts are driving me gaga

From: John Winters (newstmp_at_sinodun.org.uk)
Date: 02/03/04 

Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 19:48:35 +0000 (GMT)

Can anyone direct me to some good documentation which describes how
to set up a sensible font configuration for Gnome?

I'm running Gnome 2.4 on Debian Sarge and until recently it was OK-ish.
A few niggles, but nothing to worry about. Then for no apparent reason,
several applications (e.g. Evolution, GnuCash and the Gnome help browser)
decided they'd switch to a ludicrously small font for their text display.
I don't know why they did this - it may have been something to do with
me installing gsfonts-x11 - but there doesn't seem to be any way to
switch them back. The font configuration tool in the Gnome desktop is
very basic and doesn't seem to offer an option to change the default
body font. I can't discover where the applications are getting their
instruction to use this silly font from.

The Gnome documentation says that you can view the fonts by putting
"fonts:///" into the file browser and then double clicking on the file
for a selected font. Sure enough, you get a list of fonts, but if I
double click on one of them I get a dialogue box saying:

              Invalid action associated

              The action associated with Vera.ttf is invalid
              
              You can configure GNOME to associate a different application
              or viewer with this file type. Do you want to associate an
              application or viewer with this file type now?

And two buttons labelled:

              "Cancel" and "Associate Action"

Neither button does anything. The dialogue just sits there and there
seems to be no way of getting rid of it short of killing X.

I confess I have absolutely no knowledge of how the font system is
structured these days and the Gnome documentation is worse than useless.
Can anyone direct me to a good primer on the subject so I can kick some
sense back into Gnome?

TIA,
John

P.S. As a subsidiary question, how does one change the window manager
you use in Gnome 2.4? There used to be a tool to do this in the Configuration
Manager but now, although there are tools to configure each installed
window manager, the one to change window manager seems to have faded
away. 

-- 
Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England
We had a woodhenge here once but it rotted.