some fonts not showing or displaying correctly

[seahorse41]

On a Debian 8.2 Jessie installation,
I have a problem getting some fonts to work. I lean toward an installation issue, and hope it is not a bug kind of issue.
I have searched google and this forum for font issues. The closest bug I found on mozilla's pages were for the symbol font back in 2001.
This search began because a couple of my html pages won't show a symbol, defined by <font face="Monotype Sorts">.
It acts like some fonts are not installed, but they clearly show up in fc-list, which should indicate my usage of mkfontdir and fc-cache were correct.

I've made a screenshot at http://seahorsecorral.org/images/tests/ ... 151005.png, showing a font test page in mozilla, showing the url,
some preferences windows by opening Set_Appearance_Fonts (gnome I think, in Xfce)
and Gimp.
If the problem only showed in Iceweasel/Firefox, I'd focus there. But since Monotype Sorts and a few other symbol type fonts don't show correctly in both Gimp and the Set_Appearance windows, I'm thinking it is a system wide Debian problem.
LibreOffice seems to have it's own font server, as it does display Monotype Sorts correctly,
although it does not render OpenSymbol correctly on the page. while it does show it correctly in the font drop-down box.
Gimp is also showing OpenSymbol same as LibreOffice, correctly in the list box, but incorrectly on the document.
Same with Symbol.
Going thru the entire list in Gimp, I find a few more: Droid Arabic *, Droid Sans {foreign languages}, MARKSYM, micro.pcf

A few non-english fonts do show correctly: MT Extra, Fences, Klingon, and Tengwar Quenya

What do all the symbol fonts and foreign language fonts have in common, that might be turned off by a single switch somewhere?

Thank you.