Greg A. Woods writes:
> Are you sure you have the correct resolution fonts first in your font
> path (or the font path of your font server)?

No. ;-) That was a good thing to check.

I just did a quick check with xfontsel and made a more constrained
name that according to xfontsel had only one matching font.  I then
started both emacs and xterm with:

xterm -fn -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-m-100-iso8859-1 &
emacs -q -fn -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-m-100-iso8859-1 &

A cut-n-paste of a full page of text into both showed that emacs only
took 3/4 of the vertical distance to render it while xterm took all of
the vertical distance.

Ditto if I constrain the fontpath to be a simple:

  /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/

The "-q" to emacs stops any of my lisp from being loaded, so things
should be as simple as they get.

> (if (eq window-system 'x)
>     (setq preferred-frame-font
> 	  "-etl-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1"))

Are you sure the 'preferred-frame-font is still an active variable?
In a virgin emacs 21.2 it appears to be unbound.

(boundp  'preferred-frame-font)
nil

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Rupprecht    <wolfgang@wsrcc.com>     http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Coming soon: GPS mapping tools for Open Systems. http://www.gnomad-mapping.com/