Comment 11 for bug 948245

Seems to be a Pango problem. I wrote some little test programs based on "Hello World" with some UTF8 characters
replacing part of the string and built them against devlibs. The Cairo version properly rendered using the symbol font. Oddly the Pango version not only messed up the UTF8 characters (with the substitutions noted in post 6 above) but also failed to render any other latin characters in Greek (r not rho, for instance). So not only does it seem to be in Pango,but Pango seems to do slightly different things in Inkscape and the test program.

The attached zip has Pango, cairo, and gtk test programs (there is also one in there called just "test"
which won't build, not sure why.)