I was unable to fix the rendering in evince by tweaking those fontconfig-config options. For me, so far only modifying SplashFTFont.cc and recompiling has improved the rendering.
The problem is worst at small font sizes (attachment). ** Attachment added: "Bad hinting at small font sizes" http://librarian.launchpad.net/6527474/evince-bad-hinting.png -- Bad rendering (hinting) in Evince and Xpdf https://launchpad.net/bugs/26118 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs