16 bit font issues

[Jules Bean <jules@jellybean.co.uk>]

Hi all,

I have a deep misunderstanding of fonts and encodings, so this may be
garbled, but here goes:

I have a bug report (109488) about certain text widgets (gtk) being
garbled.  The questioner believes that this is due to certain fonts
being requested without giving an encoding preference (just "-*-"),
and a 16 bit font being returned where the client program is expecting 
an 8 bit font.

I also see a similar program in some other gtk programs: e.g. Galeon,
at some font sizes only, and Pan.

Is the diagnosis correct?  Is it worth trying to fix 'centrally'
(e.g. by ensuring that requests with unspecified encoding always
return an 8-bit encoding of some kind), or should it be a bug filed
against each application?

Confused experiments with a gtk font selection dialog suggest that
there is no longer an 8-bit encoding of fixed(misc)?  Although there's 
clearly something I don't understand, because I asked the dialog to
only show me iso8859-1, and it still gave me some 2-byte ones.

Any illumination, including pointers to discussions of this issue,
welcomed.

Jules