Shalabh,

Thank you for your roadmap which is comprehensive.
I will just focus on giving an answer to the first point.


Shalabh Raizada wrote:
> Squeak is an IDE running on its own virtual machine. It uses 8-bit
> 
> bitmap fonts. 

This was true for pre 3.8-Squeak. With Squeak 3.8gamma (Squeak3.8g-6527
exactly) and the package posted by Boris Gaertner (which contains an
experience report and some additional changesets,
a very comprehensive font called SofijaUC29 and a glyph browser)
you get a Unicode bitmap font solution.

I consider this to be a good start.
If I remember well the glyphs for hindi and telugu are in the SofijaUC29
font. Squeak had for a very long time only bitmap fonts and people could
do successful projects with it. One advantage of going for bitmap fonts
only is that you can run your Squeak application on any computer
regardless what you find preinstalled as fonts.


Squeak 3.6 (for 3.7 I didn't check because I am changing directly from
3.6 to 3.8) has TrueType font loader methods which are still in 3.8.
Alexander Lazarevic has posted sa code snippets where he managed to
display a single character of a Unicode true type font. Recently when I
checked it didn't work anymore. I posted a bug report on Mantis
regarding this. But in some time TrueType support will be here for
Unicode as well I suppose.

Squeak 3.6 doesn't support Unicode whereas 3.8 does if you take the 
additions  Boris provides. His font as well includes
a wealth of mathematical symbols. It is not yet in the release because
Boris and Yoshiki like to have done more testing before. So perhaps may
I ask you to download the most recent 3.8gamma and the additions by
Boris and test it and give feedback (for specific things direcly to Boris)?


Hannes



References:

Squeak3.8gamma:
ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/Smalltalk/Squeak/3.8beta/Squeak3.8g-6527.zip

Additional change sets and SofijaUC font:
http://www.bgaertner.gmxhome.de/Sqm17n.htm


Lazarevic TTCFontReader test
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2004-August/080769.html