When I launch terminator with a large font (say... Monospace 20), the terminal window opens up at about the same sized as font 'fixed'; however, the columns and rows are reduced to 40x12, because the font size is so large. This occurs in terminator 0.14 (and earlier versions as well) whether I have geometry_hinting on or off.
I mentioned this on the IRC channel, and the relevant discussion with a user 'Ng' pointed to a possible cause:
(05:05:05 PM) Ng: wamcvey: interesting, it's supposed to always open at 80x24
(05:20:08 PM) Ng: ohh, I bet I know what's happening here, we'll be setting the size of the window before we set the font size
(05:23:44 PM) wamcvey: hehe... let me ask a different question then... Are you able to reproduce the bug? If so, I'll open a ticket on it.
(05:23:54 PM) Ng: yep, I can reproduce it
(05:25:29 PM) Ng: unfortunately the bug is still present in the very latest development version, but I'm going to go and read gnome-terminal's code a little closer to see how they set their size on startup
fixed in trunk revision 1291