Problem with Bitstream Vera font install

[Jesse Sheidlower]

After advice received here about why my upgrade of Mozilla to 1.3
was displaying lousy fonts, I recently read through the font
section of the Handbook and installed everything it recommended,
and turned on anti-aliasing with Xft.

The results are worse than they were before, but perhaps
that's just a taste issue. In any case, the non-personal-taste
problem is that Bitstream Vera Serif (the Handbook-suggested
font to use for everything), when displayed by Mozilla in
italics, is slanted diagonally _upwards._ That is, each
character is raised, so a word in italics might look like

                 .
                s 
               c
              i
             l
            a
           t
a word in i

(The slant isn't that severe, but it does render things
unreadable.)

In other fonts, including for instance Bitstream Vera Sans,
this does not happen; italics just slants each individual
character on the baseline, like it's supposed to.

Any ideas, aside from chucking it all and recompiling
Mozilla with WITHOUT_XFT=yes ?

Thanks.

Jesse Sheidlower