SVG Fonts

["Gail Carmichael" <gail banaszkiewicz gmail com>]

I'm helping someone work on an implementation for SVG Fonts for Inkscape and have a question I'm hoping you might be able to help with.

Suppose I want to use PangoLayout to lay out a string of text as per normal, but that I don't have the font actually on my system.  Instead, I have an SVG Font, which essentially amounts to having SVG paths for the glyphs required.  Is there a way to "fake" the needed Pango font to get the correct layout from a string of text, using the information available from the glyphs provided? Or is there no way around using some font already on the system?

Thank you kindly,
Gail