I'm stuck and wondering if anyone can help.
Originally for my applicaition 'witter' I was using the standard CellRendererText to render all the tweets. This worked well enough and rendered all languages nicely (at least all the ones I saw) Eg various asian languages, and others.

To make witter look nicer, I switched to using my own custom cell renderer which uses cairo to render text.
This however just renders little boxes where glyphs should be for anything that isn't a romanised set of characters.


After a bit of digging I read that I should be using pango, rather than cairo to render text and that it should somehow take care of it...

So I switched to getting a pangocairo.cairoContext
and using a pango.FontDescription set on a layout.
then set_text to the layout and show that.
This now renders little boxes with the hex values in. ;-(

Am I missing something obvious? How do I get back to a state of being able to render all these languages properly?

I'll answer my own question...
foolishly I assumed that working in scratchbox was the same as running on the box in regards such as fonts.
But no...
so the code was working fine once I'd got to boxes with hex chars in, and when I ran that on the real device all the fonts rendered fine.