Some people have been recently talking about free Unicode fonts. It might interesting them to learn of the ucs- fonts project - which has extended many standard X11 fonts to a decent Unicode range. Soon, the -Adobe- pixel fonts will also be ready to a quite large range.

If you have XFree86 4.0, you already have these fonts, and a UTF-8 supporting xterm. Just type "xterm -u8 -fn 9x18u" and lo! This doesn't support CJK or combining characters, but you can get a patch for that, which hopefully will be integrated into the standard Xterm soon.

Obviously this doesn't support Indic scripts, however works in ongoing on support for Indic scripts in Pango, and will hopefully be ready for 1.0, along with a decent selection of pixel fonts for : Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Burmese, Gujarati, Oriya, and possibly other scripts.

OpenType support is more confusing, and something I'd prefer not to have to do on my own. If anyone is interested in collaborating on this issue, I'd strongly recommend getting on the appropriate mailing lists, including fonts@xfree86, and the linux-utf8.

Some folk also might be interested to learn a stab at a free TrueType font editor exits. The main thing missing from this is hinting. All that is needed for OpenType is editors for Numerous Tables.