Sheared text is being rendered rotated by the FreeType bridge code. Example PostScript: %! /Helevetica 50 selectfont 100 100 moveto [1 0 1 1 0 0] concat (T) show showpage
fixed in revision 9583, patch here: http://ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-cvs/2009-March/009157.html