Installing dia (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/) is optional, unless you have diagrams in dia format or you wish to create some.
Recent dia (dia-0.96-pre1 and newer) seem to have fixed the bugs, below.
For older versions of dia, please see on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ bugs
153606 Add --show-layers=LAYER,LAYER flag for automated export 153607 Pango fonts are crappy in Acroread, Latin 1 fonts are goo... 153609 Wrong (too small) text size in multiline text using PANGO...
The bug #153606 is most relevant for enabling automated exports. Bug #153607 may be relevant for european language uses. Bug #153609 contains an important patch to work around the problem (disabling font cache).