You could probably grab the next version that was published to Debian (3.04-14), throw it into a PPA to build against 20.04 and it would probably work. People have also published this kind of thing as an update in the official repositories in the past in this sort of case where the fix wasn't available at the time of release so it's missing from just one release.

I appreciate that this is all a non-trivial exercise for someone not familiar with the tooling though.

i don't really have that excuse, just this evening i compiled qemacs and jove from source, in the latter case from the debian source package