Stephen Gildea <stepheng+emacs@gildea.com> writes:

> At HEAD (29.0.50), I get an ugly scaled font for my sans-serif text.
> I noticed it in MH-E, and you can reproduce it as follows:
>
>     emacs -Q -fn fixed --eval "(buffer-face-set 'variable-pitch)"
>
> Although the default font is specified on the command line as "fixed"
> (from the misc-fixed X11 family of fonts), and the variable-pitch font
> selected is not in the misc-fixed family, having "fixed" as the
> default font affects the font selected for the "variable-pitch" face.
> Which font it selects changed recently.

You didn't include the output from `M-x report-emacs-bug' -- what OS are
you running Emacs on?

On the current Ubuntu, your recipe gives me: