I'm using QGIS 2.0 but this problem was also present in QGIS 1.8.
I have a truetype font of freeway symbols that I use to label polylines. Each symbol requires between three font characters to display correctly. For this reason, each character has a field and I have duplicated the shapefile three times and use a different field for the label each time and overlap the labels.
In the labeling engine, we can change the number of label candidates to one to force labels to overlap and this works great in the QGIS map canvas (working environment - see picture 1 below) but it's not working in the composer. The composer shows the three labels side by side instead of overlapping (see picture 2 below).
In QGIS 1.8, with labeling from the layer properties menu (that is now deprecated if I'm not mistaken) worked fine with overlapping labels but it would create "static" labels. The labeling from the layer menu creates "dynamic" labels that move around with zoom level.
I would like to have overlapping dynamic labels that also work in the composer. How can I make the labeling engine do this?