font problems

[Dan McMahill <mcmahill mtl mit edu>]

Hello,

I have just converted a program of mine to use gtk_print and cairo+pango 
for printing instead of my 10 year old hand coded postscript output. 
I'm mostly happy with the results, very happy to get printing working 
under win32 as well, but am having a font problem.

I am selecting a font with

desc = pango_font_description_from_string("serif");
pango_font_description_set_size(desc, font_size*PANGO_SCALE);
pango_layout_set_font_description(layout, desc);


My english text coming out to a pdf file or to my postscript printer 
looks great.  But I have a few greek characters here and there.  For example

pango_layout_set_markup(layout, "<markup>Relative dielectric constant, 
\316\264<sub>r</sub> = 3.8</markup>", -1);


The unicode character there is a lower case greek epsilon.  When I print 
to PDF, that character is clearly bitmapped and looks ugly compared to 
the rest of the text.  When I send to my postscript printer, it (the 
epsilon) doesn't even come out.

When I do the same from a win32 build, the printed character looks 
pretty good as do upper and lower case delta and rho.

Is there a better way to use greek letters for variables or mathematical 
symbols?   Is there a more standard (portable across all expected 
platforms) way I should get a font?

Thanks
-Dan