[SGVLUG] Anyone know of a font snooper?

[Dustin]

So now that I've recovered the baby website from hardware failure and I
don't have family breathing down my neck :-), I had a bit of time to play
with my own hardware so I messed with improving the fonts on my laptop
last night.

Dear god, it's fonts on X-Windows.  Oh, the *humanity*.

For those of you that don't know, fonts are the elephant in the room of
desktop Linux that people tend not to talk about.  Fonts in X still just
*suck* (and I haven't even tried to deal with OpenOffice yet, which seems
to have it's own entirely separate font rendering engine).  I'd give a
talk on getting them right, except I don't think I've ever satisfied
myself that I managed it.

Anyway, things went moderately well--I got acquainted with fontconfig in
an intimate way, got sub-pixel rendering working, and installed some of
the nicer basic fonts (it pains me inexpressibly to find that I still
prefer the Microsoft Verdana font for ordinary text on the desktop over
anything freer), but as usual not everything works.

A very common problem is that some web page requests an ugly font that (no
doubt the selected font is bitmapped) and renders jaggy.  Rearranging the
order in xorg.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf probably would fix this, but
it would help immensely to know which font is being used.  So here's the
question: are there tools to help debug font problems?  I'd love to be
able to force Firefox to tell me exactly what font was requested for the
current page (without trying to chase through the page source and .css
files) and (I don't know how to do this with any amount of work) what font
was in fact chosen.

In short, I want some sort of interactive font snooper.  Anybody ever 
heard of such a thing?

Dustin