On Sat, 21 Dec 2019 at 02:32, Samuel Sieb <samuel@sieb.net> wrote:

I'm guessing that you've somehow got a different font in the one
account.  I know in the past if I got an email or some text with a
Chinese or similar character encoding, the English characters would look
as you described them.

Makes sense to me.   I once was involved in preparing a proceedings for a
conference where there were submissions prepared using MS Word in
English, but some speakers were from Japan.  For those speakers, the
text used a Unicode font which provides English glyphs.  At some
point a free font was substituted for the (proprietary) Japanese fonts.  When
converted to PDF the quality of was poor due to lack of font hinting.

I have also encountered a case where I wanted to unmount the partition
containing texlive.  The texlive outline fonts were configured in fontmap
so available to apps other than TeX.  The unmount failed. Using lsof
revealed two texlive font files open in Gnome Shell.   I would expect
Gnome Shell to stick to some always available default fonts, but
perhaps it looks for alternatives if the default fonts lack something.

--
George N. White III