Comment 4 for bug 69314

By doing some googling, I was able to find a workaround. By default the bitmap fonts are disabled, so you need to run these two commands:

1) sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
Answer the questions, and specifically, answer yes to the question about enabling bitmap fonts.

2) sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
This will update the font cache etc., and at least for me, the bitmap fonts became immediately available after starting new programs. There was a minor, easily solvable side-effect, though: firefox by default uses fonts like helvetica, times etc., which happen to be bitmap fonts. Just go to the preferences, and change these to some scalable fonts that you like.