Running xlsfonts, I some up with a LOT of fonts that are not installed on my system. (Adobe-Utopia is one example of many.) I think this is what causes the common problem people have with Xscreensaver's, Fontglide. Is there any way to make it list only fonts that are actually installed?

How do you know that xlsfonts lists any fonts that aren't actually installed? Maybe you just need to run "dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig" and select "enable bitmapped fonts by default" in order to make those fonts visible for applications?

You can also install gtkfontsel, which is a nice tool for viewing your installed X fonts (better than xfontsel, IMO).

My Debian system has also some adobe-utopia fonts -- they came with the tex4ht-common package.

OK. I did those things, and it's a lot better. I think Fontglide found the Adobe-Utopia fonts, but it's still trying to find a few it can't

for example

How come these names (hevetica, lucidabright, utopia, etc) don't show up using the 'locate' command? GTKfontsel finds them ok.

I don't know why xscreensaver cannot find those fonts. Perhaps you should run (as root) "dpkg-reconfigure libpango1.0-common" and check that you've entrusted font management to defoma? You can also try (as root) "fc-cache -fv" but, if that doesn't help, I really have no idea how to fix your problem with fonts.

The "locate" command might need updating its database (by running "updatedb" as root) before it can find all the files on your mounted partitions. After updating, "locate helvetic", "locate lucida" and "locate utopia" should turn up some useful results. You can check to which package a file belongs with "dpkg -S file_name".

Many good suggestions. Thanks. I will work thru them, more for the learning experience than to solve a real problem. I definitely would have run updatedb before using 'locate', tho. I suspect that the reason xscreensaver can't find a few fonts now is related to incomplete font sets provided by whatever program is harboring 'lucidabright', etc.

Information in GTKfontsel says 'Bold' is included in Helvetica, for instance, but it is not listed among the selectable options. (Hope that is understandable. lol).

...and I knew there was an option like dpkg -S, but hadn't gotten around to looking it up, yet.