Character spacing for bitmap fonts
The spacing between characters in bitmap fonts is off - it is too close. Strangely, this problem seems to affect apps like Thunar (XFCE) and Nautilus (Gnome) but not Firefox (XFCE). The example below uses micross.ttf, the MS Sans Serif font, directly copied from a fresh Windows 10 installation, though I've also found this error with Tahoma as well various open bitmap fonts.
I am not sure if this is a problem with Pango, HarfBuzz or downstream from you, since Firefox seems to render these fonts properly.
Screenshots are from Xubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 20.10 (Pango version 1.44.7 and 1.46.2, respectively). I also see this on Arch Linux XFCE and Gnome (version 1.48.0).