Boris,

> The move to 3.4 is a very pleasant progress: In Squeak 3.2,
> the debugger does not work properly in MVC - this is a 
> serious problem for MVC users and it was fixed in 3.3.
> The SAR installation package works excellent - thank you
> for making it available.

  You're welcome and thank you for trying!

> As to the fonts, there are some really good free bdf-fonts available
> in the internet. It is entirely possible to find all glyphs of the
> blocks 'CJK Unified Ideographs' and 'Hangul Syllables' in the
> web. (in one size only, but for the beginning that is sufficient.)
> At http://www.bgaertner.gmxhome.de/UnicodeResources.htm
> you find details and code that can be used to load large bdf-fonts
> into a 3.4 image.

> I loaded the ClearlyU font and the cmex24m.bdf  font into a
> Squeak 3.4 image. To do that, I used code that splits these
> large fonts into many StrikeFonts. Glyphs from U+4E00 to
> U+4EFF are placed into one StrikeFont, glyphs from
> U+4F00 to U+4FFF into a different StrikeFont and so on.
> This is not what we really need, but at least I can use my
> font editor to look at the fonts.

  Well.  I haven't looked at it carefully, but it sounds like cmex34m
is based on Big6 glyphs?

> Currently the class Unicode does not have subclasses for
> these glyph blocks:
>   UnicodeHangulSyllables
>   UnicodeKangXi Radicals
>   UnicodeCJKRadicalsSupplement
>   UnicodeBoPoMoFo
>   UnicodeHangulJamoCompatibility
>   UnicodeCJKUnifiedIdeographs
>   UnicodeCJKUnifiedIdeographsExtensionA
>   UnicodeCJKUnifiedIdeographsExtensionB

  There are UnicodeJapanese, UnicodeTraditionalChinese, UnicodeKorean,
etc. that are what I'm planning to move to.  So far, I don't see real
need for those blocks you mentioned.

> The absence of classes for these blocks is not a surprise,
> because your  support for these writings is currently based 
> on encodings like GB2312 and KSX1001.

  *Currently* based on those encodings, yes.

> Now my questions: 
> 1. Will we have subclasses for these Unicode blocks? 
> 2. What leading chars will be assigned to these blocks?

  The answer is:

  To overcome the han unification problem, we'd like to put different
leading chars for a Unicode code point for an ideograph character.
UnicodeJapanese etc. exist for this purpose.  You can add
ContinentalChinese support with BIG5 based font, but such glyphs
simply are not usable for Japanese.

  This explanation may be too terse.  If you want to know more about
what I'm thinking, please let me know and I'll elaborate.

  Thank you again,

-- Yoshiki