Thanks for the extra help!!
Now I've imported a big chunk of Nepali text from wikipedia and in the morning we'll see if it appears as proper Nepali or if it's mangled up somehow.
The current Squeak text renderer does not support ligatures, composing characters etc. The Pango-based one should take care of that.
I'd like to understand the options and issues a little better -- How soon is Pango support likely to be easily available for all platforms - days, weeks, or months?
If it's not immediate then it would be interesting to hear a sketch of how to add ligature, composing characters etc support directly into Squeak for devanagari.
Thanks again! -Luke