TextMesh doesn’t really lend itself to doing custom stuff 
I’d love to be able to access the TextMesh data that defines the shape of the character planes it generates.
Also - is there any hint as to how Unity is importing TTF files? Is it completely built into the editor or is there some method in Mono/.NET for (somewhat) easily extrapolating the character data of a TTF for atlasing?
Created custom TTF by combining bold/italic/normal versions of Arial into the same sheet - required a bunch of fixing on the Italic lettering because of the bearing/kerning thats inherent in italic fonts (things that the unity textmesh seems to outright ignore - causing a buncha problems)
AAAANYWAY… this is a valid enough solution for now 
flags %I and %B start/end italic/bold sections that shift the font into unicode-range by offsetting the integer value of each char by 128.
