Comment 21 for bug 1166125

This package was somehow auto-installed in a release upgrade today from 14.04 to 14.10, and cost me most of the day trying to figure out why everything in X was glitchy and crashing. The terminal looked like
http://askubuntu.com/questions/285836/letter-spacing-in-gnome-terminal

Even xterm would crash on ctrl-right-click, and these badly-spaced strange characters appeared in almost every terminal emulator (xterm worked, except for its menus). Font selection dialogs ground the computer to a halt, and even the window manager titlebars were in a wonky font. Yet, something was showing, so it was a lot of work to investigate the entire stack of X11, Xft, fontconfig, freetype, pango, gtk, etc to find what component was bad.

sudo apt-get purge pango-graphite

solved the problem. No idea how that package got installed, but it's removal fixed everything immediately. There is a serious problem with this package in the 14.10 release of ubuntu as well.