Tsukurimashou Font Family and IDSgrep

What's new in 0.11

It's been about three and a half years since the version 0.10 release, and the COVID-19 pandemic, still ongoing as I write this in June of 2021, affected more than a year of that time. I am still running my synthesizer business, North Coast Synthesis Ltd. Please visit https://northcoastsynthesis.com/ for high-quality Eurorack modules and kits. The business is bringing in enough money for me to live on, but just barely. I'm still living from one customer order to the next.

My roadmap for Tsukurimashou is still much as it was in the last release. This version 0.11 covers all the grade-school kanji up to a little past the halfway mark of Grade Six, now including the 20 "prefectural name" characters that the Japanese school system added to Grade Four after the time when I set up my checklists. I plan to complete Grade Six in version 0.12. It only calls for 81 more kanji, plus whatever other ones are convenient to add along the way. Then, after that, the next release will be version 1.0, with no specific additional kanji planned, but the chance to tidy up any issues that might be found in version 0.12 and have a clean release that is complete in some important sense.

I feel pretty well committed to seeing this project through to the 1.0 release, but I don't know if I will continue it past there. It has been about ten years' work now, and it will be at least a little more than that by the time 1.0 is actually released. A lot has changed in my life over that time. I haven't been as successful at learning the Japanese language as I'd hoped, and some of the incentives for me to keep trying no longer exist. This project also hasn't attracted as much third-party attention as I had hoped it would, and third-party attention is now even more important as a reason to continue it, than was earlier the case.

But having a font family that can reasonably be used for at least some practical typesetting, not just demonstration purposes, will be an important milestone and will open up a lot of possibilities. I still have some hope that once I push the version 1.0 release I can expect it to be actually adopted by people other than myself, and that will improve the profile of the project. I'm also still looking out for ways I might be able to gain money or professional status from this project, which are the things that I'd really need to have to make it feasible to keep working past 1.0.