[racket-dev] [scribble] Unicode in exact-chars elements

I've been writing a paper in scribble, dropping to LaTeX every so often to write in native math mode. I notice that unicode characters don't show up. I've ripped off display-protected from latex-render.rkt, removed the latex command syntax escaping (so I can have backslashes, underscores and carets) and every time I have a new unicode character I want to use, I have to add to the big case expression. I then translate all elements before putting them in the exact-chars element. I don't know how to wrap delayed and part-relative elements, but I haven't needed to yet.

What's worse is that I have to do a 1 character look-ahead for composing characters such as \hat{#1} and \tilde{#1} (\u0302 \u0303).
This is getting tiring, and from a short Googling I found that we could be using XeTeX as the backend instead to get direct unicode support. Are there plans for a XeTeX backend? I'm not sure how much work that would be as I don't know the subtle differences between it and LaTeX.

I'll keep doing my dispatching for now, I'm just curious.
Thanks,
-Ian