Arabic line spacing problem

["Boncek, John" <jboncek Hunter COM>]

I have an application with internationalized text display working well,
mostly, using UTF-8 and gdk_draw_layout to draw text.  However, I have a
problem with the application in Arabic.  Spaces between lines in
multi-line Arabic text are coming out much larger vertically than in other
scripts, causing Arabic text to vertically run off areas that other
scripts having the same number of lines fit into.  The spacing looks
almost like a blank line is being interposed between each two valid lines.

I have verified that both Arabic and languages displaying correctly have
just one \n between lines.