https://crawlingrobotfortress.blogspot.com/2021/10/semigraph...
(Blitting unicode glyphs to screen is not hard or slow; In this project, the glyph rendering code turned into spaghetti to save on space. Cleaner rendering code is possible if using uncompressed bitmap fonts. If there is a concern about size on disk, you could only install the codepages needed for a given locale? But then again, unless you include the various pages of Chinese characters, we're still talking no more than a few hundred K to store all of Unicode as a bitmap font. True, handling combining modifiers probably would increase binary size and maintenance costs, but again... if it fits on an Arduino it's probably OK for the desktop. And if you're already OK with not supporting unicode, you're probably OK with supporting most of unicode except combining modifiers.)