While around the topic of exotic characters, note that FreeType (but not my
Squeak code) supports all the various character encodings of truetype, like
Mac, Win, and Unicode.

There's a free, high-quality Bitstream Cyberbits font with a full Unicode
char set. It's almost 13MB big! I guess our Japanese squeakers would
appreciate it, for example. It looks like Times but also contains Arabic,
Thai, Cyrillic, etc. etc. characters. Note that it's 200 times bigger than a
regular font so there's quite a bit of stuff in there.

Just write a method or two in Squeak for mapping the characters (I can show
what methods to write but don't know Unicode or character encodings in
general) and you could put all these characters in a bitmap font and use
this like in any regular Squeak font for text. With the fancy anti-aliasing
and all, I can imagine that the Japanese characters will look really sharp
on eg. the Zaurus' color LCD.

It would also make a really cool Squeak demo with those Thai letters that
look like little elephants.

Unfortunately, a 13MB Windows font is a bit more than my Mac font software &
RAM can swallow so I haven't been able to open it up and look inside it.

However, the license seems to exclude re-distribution, and Bitstream has
stopped supporting it. But individual use seems fine and the quality is
professional-level.

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/babble/download/cyberbit.html


Henrik

PS. In other news, the FreeType people have just released the first version
of a patent-free, universal autohinting engine that will replace the current
one in the final 2.0, but I haven't tried it.