Glenn Morris wrote:

> Thanks, but it makes no difference for me on RHEL7.
> Emacs still uses the same poor non-xft font:
> 
>  x:-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-m-90-iso8859-1 
> 
> (The addition of fixed-pitch-serif as a base face is of course desirable.)

Thanks for checking. I reproduced your problem on Ubuntu 16.04 by installing the
optional package xfonts-75dpi. Please try the attached patch to emacs-25 instead
of what I sent earlier. This patch tries to address Eli's comments, which I'll
follow up on separately.