Comment 4 for bug 595159

Then you probably have a mismatch with fontconfig and XSETTINGS.

When loading "DejaVu Sans", Chromium will pay attention to the fontconfig settings (try `fc-match -v "DejaVu Sans"` and look at the hinting, hintlevel settings, among others). However, when loading a TTF from the network, there's no fontconfig information, so the XSETTINGS values will be used.

Hinting can move the glyph control points, altering the advance width. If you think that your hinting settings really do match then please include screenshots.