Here’s my easy and modern guide to getting pleasant looking fonts on Gentoo with minimal effort.

USE Flags

Enable the following USE flags:

euse --enable truetype type1 cleartype corefonts

and make sure everything is built with them enabled:

emerge -uDNa world

Emerge Fonts

X.org and other apps should pull in some common fonts.  Here are some additional fonts useful for OpenOffice and other programs.  Dejavu provides excellent default fonts which we will enable in the next section.

app-admin/eselect-fontconfig
media-fonts/corefonts
media-fonts/dejavu
media-fonts/font-bh-ttf
media-fonts/font-bh-type1
media-fonts/freefonts
media-fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera
media-fonts/unifont
media-fonts/artwiz-aleczapka-en

Enabling fontconfig options

Use ‘eselect fontconfig list‘ to see a list of available configuration options.

Try enabling the following with ‘eselect fontconfig enable <num from list above>’:

10-autohint.conf
10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf
25-unhint-nonlatin.conf
57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
57-dejavu-sans.conf
57-dejavu-serif.conf

This will give you very nice hinted fonts suitable for the great majority of RGB LCD displays.

The 57- series rules enable dejavu fonts as the default Serif and Sans Serif fonts.  This will improve the look of your desktop environment and programs like Firefox immediately.

~/.fonts.conf

This file controls your user fontconfig settings.  We will reiterate RGB hinting and disable it for bold fonts so they are not overly bold.  There are plenty of other tricks you can perform in this file to get more Windows-like text, but I’m quite satisfied with the following and find it very easy to read.

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="rgba">
 <const>rgb</const>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
 <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
 <const>hintfull</const>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
 <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <!-- Disable autohint for bold fonts so they are not overly bold -->
 <match target="font" >
 <test compare="more" name="weight" >
 <const>medium</const>
 </test>
 <edit mode="assign" name="autohint" >
 <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

Conclusion

Please share any thoughts and tips in the comments.  I recommend browsing the X.org Font Guide on Gentoo Wiki, though some of the information there is out of date or more complex than the method I just outlined.