Has anyone done any work on neatly integrating UTF8 strings, editing, our scanners, displaying with Cairo/pango etc?

I have the Cairo/pango based Unicode plugin working on the pi but I'd like to use it neatly rather than ad hoc hacky. Nic Cellier & I did a lot of clean up last year for the scanners implementations of scanning but not so much for the displaying. It seems like something that ought to be done at some point. I'm actually a bit miffed to discover that Cairo/pango requires UTF8 strings, which have to about the most complicated possible strings for editing. We have our Mac-roman encoded byte strings and full Unicode 32bit wide strings and can indeed convert to/from UTF8 but I'm not too keen on constantly going back and forth.

Is there anything out there I can use?

/tim
{insert witticism here}