Using the Symbol font with pango (continued)

[Timothée Lecomte <timothee lecomte ens fr>]

Dear pango specialists,

In January, I posted a message to ask for help regarding the use of the
Symbol font in pango. I finally found that manually translating from the
"Symbol encoding" to unicode was working, whereas using directly the
"Symbol encoding" was not producing any Symbol characters, or at best only
for some of them characters.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2006-January/msg00003.html

For the "at best only for some characters" part of the problem, I now
think it is because I had the Microsoft Symbol font (symbol.ttf), but not
the Adobe one. But it remains a mess in my mind, I can't figure out how it
is supposed to work :

I have found the file :
   /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encoding/adobe-symbol.enc.gz
which precisely contains the map between the "Symbol encoding" and Unicode.
So I guess the whole font subsystem should be aware of that special encoding.

Some days ago, I updated pango to 1.12.2, and now I have Symbol characters
not only for the proper unicode characters, but also for the regular
encoding. Let me explain with an example :

In Unicode, an 'a' is an 'a', a greek "alpha" is an "alpha".
For the Symbol font, an 'a' is an "alpha".

Before I updated to pango 1.12.2, an 'a' in the Symbol font would be
rendered as an 'a', taken from another font (the default font I guess).
Somebody with pango 1.10.1 just confirmed that he was seeing the same.

Now, the 'a' in the Symbol font is actually rendered as an "alpha" taken
from the Symbol font.

So, what is the expected behaviour ?

I did a diff between pango 1.12.1 and 1.12.2, and I didn't see any
relevant change (maybe in pango/opentype/ftxgpos.c, but I can't see why).
So could it be that the recompilation took into account other changes in
my setup (I recently switched to full utf-8, and installed the Adobe
Symbol font only a few days before the pango update) ?

I am very confused...

Regards,

Timothée Lecomte