[texhax] Bullets and Unicode fonts

[Joel Salomon]

Using the instructions at <http://ipe.compgeom.org/pdftex.html>, I got
Victor Gaultney's Gentium font <http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium> mostly
working with LaTeX.  When I added an itemized list to a document,
though, PDFLaTeX complained about not finding a character and
substituting one from a different font.  Turns out it was the bullet
character it couldn't find.  On the other hand, using the \item[•]
form (i.e. explicitly putting Unicode character 2022 in) worked.

Is there some reasonable way to make \item use the Unicode bullet
character if it's available?

Is there someone working on a Gentium package that would include this?

Thanks,
--Joel