problem with double width floating diacritic

Hi,

First of all, sorry if I'm doing something obviously wrong. I've only 
just started working with PDF:API2 and am struggling to find much 
documentation.

I have utf8 input that includes "U+0361 Combining Double Inverted 
Breve" characters. This looks like a sort of arch that goes over the 
top of two base characters. My problem is that although the resulting 
PDF visually has this arch over the first base character, it also 
visually has whitespace following, in the middle of the word. E.g. 
for "Nezhinskaia" with the arch over the "ia" it looks like 
"Nezhinskai   a" with the arch over "i ".

I have tried a couple of different fonts and the same happens. I'm 
particularly wanting it to work with DejaVu Sans.

Can anyone help?

I can show you my full test code if you want, but the basics of what 
I've tried are:

[...]
my $font_obj = $pdf->ttfont( $normalFont, '-encode' => 'utf8');
[...]
my $pdf_page = $pdf->page;
my $pdf_txt = $pdf_page->text();
$pdf_txt->font( $font_obj, $font_size );
$pdf_txt->textlabel( $x, $y, $font_obj, $font_size, $test_string );
[...]

Thanks,

kf