At present, the only way one can change the font is through the general option setting. It would be nice if I could do that either through file type, or even for a buffer (essentially, adding this option to the global option/buffer option menu).

Why? For most of the programming job one uses Courier or similar for well-known reasons. However, I sometimes have to edit multilingual RDF/XML files, that includes various indic, chinese, korean, etc, scripts. I can do it very well with jEdit, provided that for that particular buffer I use a proper unicode font that has those unicode characters. On my machine at least that is Arial Unicode MS. SO the only thing I can do is to change the font for jEdit in general to edit this file, and then change it back to Courier if I want to edit, for example, a txt or a python file.