I made some huge progress on the unicode branch this weekend, and we are getting closer to a point where it can be merged with maintrunk.
However, it would be nice if you could try it out. Especially if you have easy access to something else than latin1... There are a lot of limitations yet, especially combining marks might give people a hard time. I plan to add support for gtk as well and more cleanup and some consolidation before an actual merge can take place. -- Lgb