You're absolutely correct; I should have said "more than 256". It's difficult to modify TeX to handle larger character sets, but Metafont could, using that wei

You're absolutely correct; I should have said "more than 256". It's difficult to modify TeX to handle larger character sets, but Metafont could, using that weird hack that all characters of a given "mod 256" had to have the same dimensions (no doubt simply due to the limitations of TFM format).