Hi Ruprecht,

You write:

 > about that language switching thing - it will
 > always be needed

True with TeX, false with Omega.  Just as many
Bakoma users "stack" Russian and English into one
256 char encoding and hyphenation scheme, Omega
users (using their near infinite 256^2 capacity) can
stack German Russian and Polish (disjointly) into
one vf encoding and one hyphenation scheme.  This
involves something less rigid than basic unicode.

However, as you have found, the typing problem is as
bothersome as the above TeX typesetting side of things...

 > as my text-editor (UltraEdit) somehow does not
 > correctly encode Unicode text (it displays it,
 > but there is no way I can make it let me edit in
 > UniCode)

Can anyone report recent progress in
keyboarding/editing?

Cheers

Laurent S.