The problem : When using notepad the following fonts are invisible when you type anything into notepad.
Courier MS San Serif Small Fonts System
They appear in the pull down fonts menu, but if you select one of these fonts and start typing in the notepad, no characters are displayed. (As if they were white characters on a white background). ie you can still use the arrow keys to move through these invisible characters.
Huw's suggestion was spot on. On the Suse 9.3, the system that had this problem, it had fontforge 20040808-5, which is the version supplied on the Suse 9.3 professional CD's. I deinstalled the 20040808-5 version & installed fontforge 20070312-1 which solved the problem. The above fonts now display correctly.
It may be worth having ./configure check versions of fontforge to avoid this problem ?
Nick