Really weird problem: selecting “Bold” in font weight appears fine in Cairo, but not in regular rendering / preview.
Did you select Cairo in the Preview render? Software render doesn’t recognize the bold parameter, it is a bonus from Cairo only.
-G
I did. But I purposely turned it off, because the standard “Render” option (especially from Remake) doesn’t seem to have an option to render to “file” via Cairo. I usually turn Cairo off in Preview because I always try to get it to look exactly as it should when rendering, and my hunch was right: there were differences, such as this particular one.
Just thought I’d point it out, though… looks like you’ve known it already. 
Text are the one that have more differences from Software render. You have to think twice before use it in production. Maybe you can render before as a lst sequence of images and then include it into remake. After all, it is just a text scrolling, right?
-G
Actually, I did just that. After all, Remake does usually render and use lst image sequences, right? It’s just the “final render” that’s a video file.
Unless you mean something else that I’m not quite getting…
Yes, that’s what I meant.
-G
Thanks for sharing this ideas…