Viewing Plane 1 Unicode fonts in GNOME Apps (pango)

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

Hi All,
The following is just an update on viewing Plane 1 Unicode fonts in
GNOME apps. I did not see any pages talking about it so an overview
would not be bad.

Currently most Unicode fonts have characters residing on Plane 0
(0-~63000), represented as two bytes. However, in Unicode 3.2 and
Unicode 4, character sets are specified on planes >=1 for additional
scripts. A Plane 1 character requires more that two bytes.
Languages including Etruscan, Gothic, Linear B and the full repertoire
of those 60000+ chinese ideographs are represented in Plane 1 or higher.

Viewing Plane 1 fonts has been typically problematic. In Windows*, you
have to fool around the registry but it is supposed to work. On Linux,
no such documented success case was known (according to Google).
I installed a few exotic fonts with characters from Plane 1 and I
managed to view the Plane 1 test pages of Tex Texin (link below).
However, I use XD2 (Ximian Desktop 2) which has Mozilla/Galeon built
with Pango (version: 1.2.1).

Screenshots
URL: http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode-plane1-utf8.html
Should look like:
http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/~simos/Mozilla1.4.pango1.2.1.ximian.ok.png
http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/~simos/Galeon-1.3.5.pango-1.2.1.ximian.png

gucharmap 0.4.0 (distributed in XD2) and gucharmap 1.0.0 (compiled from
CVS) do not show Plane 1 fonts. According to 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2003-May/msg00038.html
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101081
Plane 1 support is planned for Pango 1.4 (current CVS: 1.3.0).
For a strange reason, you can view Plane 1 fonts with a Ximian-compiled
browser, linked to the same Pango libraries.

Potential feedback:
a. Can you view the Plane 1 test page with YOUR browser/distro?
Stock binaries of Mozilla do not come precompiled with Pango, so no
success. Remember to install a few fonts from the same test page.
b. Stock OOo 1.1 (does not appear to show text with Plane 1 fonts). How
about custom OOo compilations with Pango?
c. Are there any performance issues by not having enabled Plane >=1 font
support? Since characters can be >2 bytes long, some optimisations would
go away.

Simos

References:
* E-mail communication with Edward Trager (ehtrager at umich d0t edu)
and his excellent page http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/
titled "A Quick Primer On Unicode and Software Internationalization
Under Linux and UNIX". I wouldn't be able to put all this Plane 1+ info
in context without his feedback.
* Unicode test HTML pages
(http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/unicode-example-intro.html). You need to
install a few exotic fonts to view all tests well. Links provided.