Comment 26 for bug 165665

running Gimp 2.6 on Windows XP, these fonts appear to be supported properly. I tested symbol.ttf and Wingdings.ttf and ExtraS R from Bug 887327 to confirm that they work.

It appears that this problem was solved in Gimp by switching from Pango 1.2 to Pango 1.4, according to :
http://docs.gimp.org/en/font-problems.html

perhaps the same upgrade would work on Inkscape as well