Using KDE 3.1.2, I've found that although KDE appears to use only Xft for font rendering, and never server-side fonts, the server-side fonts are listed in the font-selection dialog along with the client-side fonts. The problem is that there are a bunch of fonts in the list which, when selected, cause a default substitute font to be displayed instead, since the font isn't actually available to Xft. Since KDE seems to always use Xft for font rendering, even when the anti-aliasing option is turned off, the names of the server-side fonts are useless and shouldn't be showing up in the font selector. The KDE 3.1 installation on my Debian system doesn't exhibit this behavior, so the bug seems to be in Gentoo's build and not in KDE itself.
kde 3.3x and recent qt/x11/fontconfig - can someone speak as to the validity of this issue? Needs to be checked.
No reply from reporter. Closing as the font setup changed a lot during the last releases.