app-text/texlive-core-2008-r5 contains a script getnonfreefonts-sys which downloads and installs additional fonts that are not included in the texlive distribution. The script itself works fine and updates the LaTeX font configuration. However, the changes are lost whenever texlive is reemerged... meaning that the installed packages as e.g. \usepackage{arial} are still working, but dvipdf does not find the font files anymore... The only way to fix this is to force getnonfreefonts-sys to re-download and re-install all fonts: getnonfreefonts-sys -a -f
Thanks for the report, assigning to maintainers.
afaik the source of the problem is still there (no way to have updmap-sys append lines to updmap.cfg in a sane way) but getnonfreefont is gone in 2010, closing as wontfix, feel free to reopen if you disagree
