A question about fonts

[Andersen, Jan]

Sorry for posting this here, where it is almost certainly not appropriate, but I don't quite know where to ask, and I suspect some of you guys probably do. So, this is my question:

I work a lot with Chinese, and need to be able to display the full range of CJK characters in Unicode; unfortunately that exceeds the capacity of all current font specifications (that I know), and I would like to see if I can do something about it. After all, when you display a character, what you need is to take your character representation (eg UTF-8) and look up a glyph - if things are reasonably sensible, it ought to be fairly doable to replace that part from somewhere and replace it with, say, a database interface. But where do I even begin to understand font-handling in X?