Please describe the problem:
While looking at some old screenshots, I was struck by how much better unhinted
Bitstream Vera Sans used to look back when I was using pango 1.6. A bit of
investigation (well, OK, a lot of investigation) tracked the change down to
version 1.54 of pango/pangoxft-font.c in GNOME CVS.

Steps to reproduce:
0. With a 72dpi display, set your font to Bitstream Vera Sans 13, and disable
hinting (but leave antialiasing turned on).
1. Compile a version of pango where pango/pangoxft-font.c is version 1.53 or
earlier (e.g. pango 1.6.0).
2. Get a GTK app to display the string "Amy Hit Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" (or, more
generally, the track listing of Counting Crows' "This Desert Life"), and look at
the nice even spacing around "i"s and "l"s with xmag.
3. Compile a version of pango where pango/pangoxft-font.c is version 1.54 or
later (e.g. pango 1.7.0).
4. Repeat step 2, and note that some of the "i"s and "l"s have one pixel's space
too few on their right-hand side.


Actual results:
Bitstream Vera Sans looks pretty nasty. (See attached screenshot.)


Expected results:
I'd expect the rendering to be the same as it was in 1.6.0.

Does this happen every time?
Yes.

Other information:
The change that caused the regression was the fix for bug 152529, which altered
how character metrics were calculated for unhinted rendering.