[ale] Font encoding in Mozilla

[Dow Hurst]

How do fonts and encodings relate to each other?  I have a installation 
of Mozilla that picks up the first font available for use in alphabetic 
order.  Either the browser or the webserver serving the page defines a 
UTF-8 encoding for the page which displays funny symbols for some 
characters.  If I change in the browser the encoding for viewing to 
Western ISO-8859-1 then the symbols are resolved into normal 
characters.  When printing out of Mozilla, whichever font is the one it 
sees first from the font server is what is printed, no matter what I 
tell the browser to use in Edit-Preferences.  I still don't understand 
the default Sans, Sans-Serif, monospace settings in the 
Edit-Preferences-Appearance-Fonts settings page.  I've used the 
about:config page in Mozilla to review the current settings but don't 
really understand what causes the above behavior.  I fixed the initial 
problem of the printed output by disabling all fonts for my system 
except fonts that are readable like Courier or Bitstream.  Whichever, 
and I think the first available, that Mozilla gets or grabs from the 
fontserver is what is used for printing.

Running SuSE 9.0 with patches, Mozilla 1.7.2 with patches.
Thanks,
Dow