Thank you for all your comments and suggestions. My interest in this question stems from the fact that I'm getting ready to do a full reinstallation of my system, and I don't want to repeat my previous mistakes.
My concern is that the unwanted packages could have landed in my hard drive when the system was first installed, even though I kept my choices at the time very minimalistic. (E.g. whatever the Debian installer uses for installing packages has the equivalent of `APT::Install-Suggests "1"` or `APT::Install-Recommends "1"`.) On closer inspection, the fraction of unwanted fonts that I got through chains of recommends is more substantial than that for chains containing suggests. And % apt-config dump | grep -i -e suggest -e recommend APT::Install-Recommends "1"; APT::Install-Suggests "0"; The config for recommends looks like one of the holes I need to plug. (I'm not sure where it's coming from; I certainly did not set it explicitly. I suppose I can negate it through /etc/apt/apt.conf.) The packages that `aptitude why` shows as being installed due to chains containing suggests remain a mystery. It could be a quirk (or bug) in `aptitude why` (e.g. for those packages there may be *other* reasons for their being installed that are based solely on recommends). Thank you all again! kj