@VictoriaP: Yup, that's why I mentioned "once you got something working, it's pretty much solid"
.
The main issue stems from the fact that the default renderer (Amazon's FreeType build) badly chokes on some fonts for no apparent reason. If you get through that, the hard part is over
. (And if you don't, using an FT override is usually a pretty good workaround, but has other implications that need to be taken care of).