I am running Ubuntu 12.04 and had the same problem.After removing all 70-something configs from /etc/fonts/conf.d and linking70-no-bitmaps.conf -> ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf and checking, that the selectfont element in the xml was not commented out and looked like this my fonts render nicely again.
<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"><fontconfig><!-- Reject bitmap fonts --><selectfont><rejectfont><pattern><patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt></pattern></rejectfont></selectfont></fontconfig>