Fixed-pitch fonts are no longer rendered into pixel-aligned character cells.

When using a fixed-pitch font, such as "Andale Mono" (provided by MS corefont pack), Qt used to render them in pixel exact "cells". Since Qt 4.8.0 (today's 4.8 branch), the font width is not rounded to a full pixel width, but is left at the (more exact, and visually more appealing) fractional pixel width.

For programs that render text into fixed-size cells, such as Konsole, this breaks the appearance unless they are rewritten to position cells at fractional pixel positions. See the attached screenshot. Above is Qt 4.7.x, below is Qt 4.8.0. Zooming into the letters you can see that text rendered using drawText() is no longer pixel-cell aligned.

I also tried setting the font's hinting preference to "PreferFullHinting", but this did not change the result.