Comment 0 for bug 1560114

By default, fontconfig-config installs a file called "/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf". It disables bitmap fonts. What good for, I don't know. Though if you later install a bitmap font "apt-get install xfonts-terminus" then that font wont show up in menus. That is not what you expect. The workaround is:

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-yes-bitmaps.conf

But you shouldn't need that and bitmap founds shouldn't be disabled.