I don't know if it helps but because the menus are rendered by the OS I can get to the font dialog, and the font preview in that dialog renders just fine. Nothing in the actual interface does though.

--
Matthew Peterson
Programmer
Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 1:38 AM, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:

On 2008-June-27  , at 20:45 , Matt Peterson wrote:

Installed versions of pango and cairo are (copied straight from macports):
 pango @1.16.5_0
 pango @1.20.2_0+no_x11
 pango @1.20.3_0+no_x11 (active)
 cairo @1.6.4_0+no_x11
 cairo @1.6.4_1+macosx+no_x11 (active)
As you can see, both of the active versions for cairo and pango have X11 disabled. I followed the instructions from http://www.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingMacOsX
under the "Compiling Inkscape with native GTK using MacPorts [experimental]" heading to the best of my ability.

then I am not sure what to tell you. I haven't been trying this for a while. I just remember hitting that problem before and finally solving it.... but I don't remember precisely how unfortunately :(
If you look into pango options (in pango's code or in macports : port edit pango) there is (was at least) a switch to specify rendering via cairo instead fo freetype. The result is that fonts are smoother than in the X11 version but that works.
I won't be able to check this more before 2 or 3 weeks. Keep me in copy of your messages until then please. It is great that you work on this.