Arabic line spacing problem

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

I have an application with internationalized text display working well,
mostly, using GTK 2.2.4, pango 1.2.5, and UTF-8.  It runs under MontaVista
Linux and uses gdk_draw_layout to draw all text.  However, I have a
problem with the application in Arabic.  Spaces between lines in
multi-line Arabic text are coming out much larger 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.  The font
descriptions in use are just "Sans" plus various sizes, for instance "Sans
20".

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

I have tried using pango_layout_set_spacing to 0.  It made no difference.