Icecat displays mahjong characters instead of alphabet

[Todor Kondić]

I know similar questions have been asked here and the problem came and went 
time and again for me personally, but here I am, a new Guix/PopOs installation 
and icecat throwing fits.

The icecat GUI (including the input text boxes), as well as some websites 
display blocks instead of characters. Some other websites do show fonts 
correctly.

Possibly relevant errors:
...
Gtk-Message: 10:48:16.732: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 10:48:16.734: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 10:48:16.815: Failed to load module "appmenu-gtk-module"

(/gnu/store/73j8fcmalx3asc5gy0rd2rcij0wqgn9v-icecat-68.4.1-guix0-preview1/lib/icecat/.icecat-real:4621):
 Pango-WARNING **: 10:48:16.816: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect 
ugly output. the offending font is 'Nimbus Sans L 9.9990234375'
...

The abovementioned Nimbus Sans does show up in my fc-list:
fc-list|grep "Nimbus Sans"
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019003l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019044l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Condensed
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019023l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Italic
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019063l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Condensed Italic
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019004l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019043l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Condensed
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019024l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Italic
/gnu/store/8ppj83wc1mmrdydh9cy7vqvg0bym8l0q-gs-fonts-8.11/share/fonts/type1/ghostscript/n019064l.pfb:
 Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Condensed Italic




I have installed font-dejavu and font-liberation (as well as some other fonts) 
and I also installed fontconfig from guix. That fc-cache has been run in '-f' 
and '-r' forms. I have also tried with the system's /usr/bin/fc-cache. Both 
XDG_DATA_DIRS and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS have been set.

I am running a multiprofile setup, similar to the one described in the cookbook 
(https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/guix-cookbook.html#Advanced-package-management)

icecat version: GNU IceCat 68.4.1esr
guix version: 09bad3cd42ca51974f3697f04ce841bf2fe6786c