For the record, DejaVu (and many other "big" fonts) have had TeX support available for some time, including the tfm's and type1's needed for (pdf)tex. E.g.: http://mirror.ctan.org/fonts/dejavu And I include the packages in TeX Live. (I wonder if GNU freefont has them; seems like it should.)
However, I doubt many users actually have them, since most TeX users do not use the original TeX Live. Also, there is the problem James alluded to of at least somewhat matching Computer Modern. And there is the problem that the result will surely be if the *user*'s setup does not have them, which is far from unlikely, in my experience. Thus I'm not sure creating graphics with Unicode characters is such a good idea, even in theory. And, in practice, I rather suspect that there would be substantial complications with using the line-drawing characters in TeX. But if someone cares enough to do the experiments, that would be fine. k
