Comment 10 for bug 438307

> pango's setting (etc\pango\pango.aliases) must be modified for Japanese.

On Mac OS X Inkscape.app includes the pango and font configuration files. If you know about changes that would improve handling of Japanese fonts it could be either changed in trunk (fonts.conf, see [1]) or maybe edited when copying 'pango.aliases' from the pango installation in MacPorts into the application bundle while packaging or - if pango needs to be built with some (locale-) specific options - it could be added as hint to <http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingMacOsX#Installing_dependencies>.

I tried to create the previously attached screenshots with the basic (to my best knowledge nearly unchanged) font configuration on a still rather vanilla OS X Leopard installation. Installing fonts like FreeSans on a user level or modifying 'fonts.conf' inside the application bundle results in different screen output of the japanese tutorials - but unfortunately my own knowledge about this issue (fonts and the specific pango and fontconfig problems Inkscape reveals on OS X) is very limited.

[1] fonts configuration files shipped with Inkscape.app:
<http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/trunk/annotate/head%3A/packaging/macosx/Resources/etc/fonts/fonts.conf>