Text comes out in a little block

Sometimes when I print some text, instead of showing the character it shoes a little rectangle where the character should be.  I am using Ubuntu Linux, if that makes any difference.  I've been able to scale the misbehaving text up and make it display correctly.  Often it isn't every character, but only some, for instance "1"s are displayed as rectangles, but all other characters display correctly.  How can I fix this problem?