True, with the medium font, you could get most simplier characters, and as special needs arrise, bigger characters could be used for the characters. It would be interesting to see would would all need to be changed to accomidate this.

We've already sort-of done this. The forthcoming Pearl portable supports kanji, and all the UTF-8 and font-plotting code was prototyped on a car-player. Two lines of existing car-player code needed to be changed for plotting to work. (This was with a 13-pixel-high Kanji font as "medium.bf", which again the screen layout code just dealt with.)

The remaining issues are Emplode, the search windows (T9ing for kana and other nonideographic character sets is easy, but T9ing for kanji isn't -- how does that sort of thing usually work?), Infotex visuals, and, possibly worst of all, the sheer size of Unicode fonts. For the prototyping I mentioned, I borrowed Mike's Mark 2a (with 16Mb); original Mark 2s like mine (12Mb) and Mark 1s (8Mb) will probably never fit Unicode fonts.

Peter