U+00AD (soft hyphen) problem

[Peter Frentrup <peter_frentrup gmx de>]

Hi,
I am working on a formula renderer using Pango.
For mathematical characters, I use the Computer Modern TrueType fonts 
from ftp://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/cm/ps-type1/bakoma/ttf/

cmex10.ttf (and the other cmex... fonts) place the smallest left angle 
bracket glyph at ISO Latin 1 character 0xAD, which is normaly the soft 
hyphen.
According to http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html, Unicode says this 
is an invisible character, but ISO Latin 1 doesn't.
Because Pango thinks it's invisible, it produces the glyph 0x0FFFFFFF, 
which is invisible. But I need the real glyph of the font.

Is there a possibility to let Pango treat this character as visible?
I could manually search for the glyph index in all four cmex.. fonts and 
use this in my code instead of calling pango_shape() as until now, but 
this would be the ultima ratio for me ;-)

Thanks,
Peter