fonts don't display correctly

[Adrian Feiguin <afeiguin uci edu>]

Hi guys, I guess this question was answered a million times, but I
couldn't find the answer in the archives. I have a RH9 box. After
compiling pango, I ran pango-viewer, and I get the list of all the
font families that are installed in my box (including the
fonts from corefonts.sourceforge.net)
However, most of them display as different versions of Times, Courier,
Helvetica, or Terminal. Symbol does not display at all. Same happens with
the gimp, Abiword, and the gtk font selector. However, Openoffice
works fine.

Another example: I modified pango-viewer to print the font description
corresponding to the selected font. Then I go to testgtk.c in the styles
example, and I do:
    font_desc = pango_font_description_from_string("times, Medium 12");
and when I use it I get a font that looks like "times, Bold, 19". This is
all very confusing.

What is the problem? Can you tell me where to look at for more
info, for fixes? Examples?
Thank you a lot!
<ADRIAN>