Above is my modified conchars.lmp for Wheel Of Karma.
The plaque and centerprint messages usually use the 2nd charset (here in yellow) whereas the console messages use the beige charset.
Both have theoretically 256 chars but only the 128 first are actually available because the last ones correspond to non ASCII chars which are not correctly parsed when strings.txt is read. So there are 2 groups of 128 unusable slots (surrounded in red in the screenshot) which are out of reach whereas they could be used for extra chars.
That's a big waste, so my idea is to consider that conchars is not only 2 charsets of 256 slots (both half unusable) but 4 fully usable charsets of 128 slots each.
I added the support for the escape sequences \1 to \4 to switch from one charset to another in the middle of a message in strings.txt.
Dummy example of what is now possible:
There's a switch from the default third (yellow) charset to the beige charset for the name of Razumen and the navigation interface below the atmospheric text.
The "navigation arrows" to the previous/next page of text are brand new characters belonging to the 2nd charset (surrounded in purple in the first screenshot).
The proposed evol makes the charset switch available for:
The proposed evol makes the charset switch available for: