does UTF-8 copy and paste (falling back to normal strings if
necessary), it understands X font encodings and translates things
accordingly so that if you have a Unicode font you can ask for
virtually any single-byte encoding and get it (Mac-Roman pterm,
anyone?), and so on. There's work left to be done (wide fonts for
CJK spring to mind), but I reckon this is a pretty good start.
[originally from svn r2395]