Fonts: Cygwin/X, ssh -Y, TigerVNC -- who's in charge?

[Henry S. Thompson]

[Warning, gnarly X-windows issues below, read at your own risk]

I run XEmacs on several Linux servers, and sometimes (always for the
time being) access them via (Cygwin) ssh -Y and/or (Windows)TigerVNC.

XEmacs and fonts are problematic in their own right, but I'm struggling
to understand the X-windows-as-such issues of this configuration, to try
to isolate my problem, which is that I'm not seeing things displayed in
the fonts I want.

In particular, I'm trying to understand as between the X servers running
on my remote servers (there has to be one, however simple, whichever way
I connect, because that's where my XEmacs instances are running, right?) 
and the Cygwin/X server on my machine at home.

Configuration 1)

I _think_ I understand that if I launch XEmacs inside an Xvnc instance
on a server, viewed using a vncviewer instance on my home machine, the
fonts available to it are determined by what fonts are available within
the remote Xvnc instance, in whatever form.

Am I also right in thinking that it does _not_ matter what fonts
TigerVNC-for-Windows finds on my Cygwin box at home?

Configuration 2)

If OTOH I launch Cygwin/XWin, and ssh -Y from a local xterm to a remote
server, where I launch XEmacs, I really don't know what happens.  Does
the sshd X server include a font server, or search for font.dirs, or???
Or does _all_ font-related activity depend on the Cygwin/X server?

Configuration 3)

Unfortunately, the configuration I like best is a mixture.  I launch
XEmacs inside an Xvnc instance on a server, viewed using a vncviewer
instance on my home machine, and fire up gnuserv inside it.  I close the
viewer, and ssh -Y back to the server from home, then run gnuclient from
the resulting shell, which brings up a separate window on the original
XEmacs instance.  I have no idea whose fonts matter in this case, can
anyone explain?

A related question: when running setup and looking at font packages, how
can I tell whether they contain new-style (fc-list will will list them,
they have names such as "DejaVu Sans Mono", or old-style (xlsfonts will
list them, they have names such as "-b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r...")?

Thanks,

ht
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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