Advice: tightening line spacing on my font?

[francis+fedora+fonts at thibault.org]

I've made a couple of fonts that are distributed through Fedora;
today, someone pointed out that Essays1743 has really wide line
spacing.  (*) Essays is based on a particular book from 1743, whose
lines are *much* closer together than that--in OpenOffice, I have to
set the paragraph spacing to about 75% to get something reasonable.  I
want to fix this, but I'm concerned about people's existing documents
getting messed up.

What do you guys think? (I thought this would be a good group of
people to talk about the installed base of a font.)

(*) A sample document: http://www.thibault.org/fonts/essays/Sample.pdf

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