Like Robert and Jose I had problems with the fontconfig upgrade, although I don't usually have them. I felt like living one year ago or so again when I saw this. Then I went back to fontconfig 2.2.3 to get this back. Someone said something like "why did it disable the autohinter?" on #gnome-debian when I showed the screenshots. My Bitstream Vera fonts are being rendered like crap, it seems. I know little about all this but will try to dig a bit into Robert's observations tomorrow morning.