LibGDX Letter spacing is reduced if I use GlyphLayout to draw a bitmap font

Question

I need to use glyphlayout so that I can centre the text, but I found if I do the text gets distorted due to the spacing being incorrect.

public SimpleButton(String text, float x, float y, float w, float h, BitmapFont font) {
    pos = new Vector2(x, y);
    this.w = w;
    this.h = h;
    this.text = text;
    this.font = font;
    glyphLayout.setText(font, text);
    hitbox = new Rectangle(x, y - h, w, h);
}

public void render(SpriteBatch batch) {
    font.draw(batch, text, pos.x, pos.y);
}

Like this it displays fine:

But using glyphlayout to draw it the spacing for some reason is different:

public void render(SpriteBatch batch) {
    font.draw(batch, glyphLayout, pos.x, pos.y);
}

Glyphlayout seems to be changing the spacing here, but I couldn't see any options for setting the spacing with it.

These are the settings for the Bitmap font in Hiero. No special fx, padding and spacing set to zero:

Answer 1

I managed to solve the problem myself but it still seems like it may be a bug. It happens because glyphLayout.setText(font, text); is declared in the constructor method but it needs to be in the render method, or otherwise continually updated. I've no idea why this is, it would seem that declaring it once in the constructor method should work fine...but for some reason it doesn't.

public SimpleButton(String text, float x, float y, float w, float h, BitmapFont font) {
    pos = new Vector2(x, y);
    this.w = w;
    this.h = h;
    this.text = text;
    this.font = font;
    hitbox = new Rectangle(x, y - h, w, h);
}

public void render(SpriteBatch batch) {
    glyphLayout.setText(font, text);
    font.draw(batch, glyphLayout, pos.x, pos.y);
}

The text with glyphlayout displays with correct spacing using this code.