Arbitrarily wide inter-character spacing when using Raleway or EB Garamond in svg text object

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. simple link approach to adding fonts to html file
2. no attempt to force use of svg font format
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Expected version, seen on half of cases, is normal inter-character spacing in a 
text string.

 In other half of cases, see variable spacing from slightly wide to grossly so.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

I am using the most recent version of the google fonts, if I understand the 
question correctly.  The problem appears (or does not appear) on all systems 
without apparent consistency -- MacOS, Windows7, ChromeOS and others.

Please provide any additional information below.

The svg text is being created in a d3.js context. The problem extends across 
the widest imaginable range of stylings (font-size, weight, etc).

Original issue reported on code.google.com by robert.p...@gmail.com on 19 Dec 2014 at 5:25

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I have discovered that this problem is due to the use of the "small-caps" 
variant with google fonts, and disappears when the normal variant is used.  I 
don't know whether the issue extends to HTML text in general, but is definitely 
the case with svg text objects.

Original comment by robert.p...@gmail.com on 20 Dec 2014 at 7:01