Well, there's always the (less ideal, IMO, but still very good) option of implementing this only at the presentation layer, in the toolbox only. This is an orthogonal feature, and can be implemented regardless of whether or not SANY is made to support unicode or not (although that would require adding the option of saving as unicode).
BTW, I believe Java has supported unicode since the beginning (which is already twenty years), and a Java char is a UTF-16 character, which should support all the characters we need.
Ron