http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10952
--- Comment #4 from Ove Kaaven ovek@arcticnet.no 2007-12-29 20:11:24 --- Exactly which font Wine resigns itself to isn't that important, it's the font's charset that matters most. But since you ask, Wine bundles Tahoma, it could use that, for example. Of system fonts, Bitstream Vera is also a good choice, if available. Or good old Helvetica. The best would probably be to make this user configurable in winecfg; Wine can already substitute font names, it just needs a user interface for it.
But I'm sure an acceptable solution only takes a couple of lines of code somewhere - with the ugliest solution being explicitly excluding Marlett from the font selection algorithm, and settling for anything else, if not explicitly asked for. Better would be to exclude all symbol fonts unless they're explictly asked for, if nothing else helps. Of course, predictability or configurability would be nice, but *that* would be more of a feature request than a major issue, so not something I'm asking for right now.