Metafont's "charext" feature allows for more than 128 glyphs, though it's kind of a cheat, as it puts artificial constraints on character dimensions. But it wou

Metafont's "charext" feature allows for more than 128 glyphs, though it's kind of a cheat, as it puts artificial constraints on character dimensions. But it would be much less trouble to modify Metafont to properly handle larger character sets than it was to get TeX to. Concerning bitmaps, it's ironic that window systems ultimately display bitmaps on the screen, yet they keep the pathway from font-outline to their character-bitmap cache internal. There's no way to tell MacOS, for instance, that you want to plug in your own provider, that it can call whenever it first wants the bitmap for a given font glyph at a given size. Too bad this API is hidden; it must exist internally in MacOS, Windows, etc.