Fonts question

[Joel Hammer]

I guess I am feeling my oats with fonts and am spoiling for a fight.

I would like to use something besides courier in my kvt terminal windows.
There are a large number of available fonts in the options field, but only
courier works. I ASSUME because it is a fixed width font.

But, you can download fonts from the internet which might be an improvement
or at least fun.

I am trying to find out how kvt gets fonts. Using an unusual font,
abberancy, I find the following:
cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts     
grep abber  --recursive * 
  yields:
   
TrueType/Fontmap.larabie-fonts:(Abberancy)  (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/abberanc.ttf) ;
TrueType/fonts.scale:abberanc.ttf -misc-Abberancy-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
TrueType/fonts.dir:abberanc.ttf -misc-Abberancy-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1             

This is good, because I think I know something about TrueType fonts. (Just a
little, really!)

Anyway, my question is, what do the fonts.scale file and the fonts.dir file
have in them? Do I need them if I install a new font? And if so, where are
these arcane measurements found?

Thanks,
Joel