I've got an old system, unmodified for years. I run emacs 21.2.1 on it using ssh X forwarding to put the emacs window on my desktop. I've just done an update of my fedora 29 system after being away for a couple of weeks, and now the fonts are all messed up.
I'm never absolutely sure about these things, but I believe the old X programs get their fonts from the server, and suddenly the fonts when I try to run this old emacs with my fedora 29 desktop as the server have gone completely wacko.
For instance, emacs claims the frame is 101 characters wide, but if I type characters across the window, I can see it is actually 81 characters wide (this is using terminus fonts which were also updated in the pile of updates I got this morning).
Anyone have any clue what might be going on here? Who is lying to whom about the fonts?