Took me quite a while to realize what was going on, but in retrospect
it's obvious -- the rasterizer just *rounds* the sub-pixel-positioned
glyph quads to nearest pixels. Which then can cause the neighboring
glyph data to leak to it (because the texture is then sampled not
directly on the edge pixel, but slightly outside of it), or it can also
cut away the edge, when it gets rounded in the other direction.
This was a problem with the original -- laughably inefficient -- atlas
packer as well, but because that packer had excessive padding around
everything, only the second edge-cutting artifact manifested, and that
one is rather subtle unless you know what to look for.
This means the packing is now slightly worse than before and sizes that
previously worked may no longer fit anymore. But since the new atlas
packer is relatively new (well, from September, time sure flies
different here), and the improvement compared to the original packer is
still quite massive, I don't think this is a problem.