Tsukurimashou 0.8 covers 1502 kanji, including all those taught through
Grade Four in the Japanese school system.  This release includes relatively
few major changes to infrastructure.  The new kanji are the main new content
in this version.  These (100 scheduled by the roadmap, roughly another
hundred spin-offs as a result of building kanji that are parts of others,
and so on) turned out to be disproportionately hard.  It seems like Grade
Four is when the Japanese school system takes the gloves off, so to speak,
and expects children to learn kanji that are much less well-behaved than
before in terms of being made of simple parts in simple ways.  Many of the
new kanji in this release contain weird stroke structures that do NOT
occur widely in other glyphs.  As a result, they required a fair bit more
new code, and this new code is likely to be less reusable, than the kanji in
earlier releases.  I'm hoping that some of the kanji in the next few
versions will be easier to handle, but that remains to be seen.

Here are some other things of note in the new version:

* Kleknev, a build system profiler, added as a parasite package.  This
actually originated in some last-minute issues that came up while packaging
the previous version, 0.7.  It remains somewhat undocumented and
experimental, but there is at least a man page.

* The expect script used for invoking XeLaTeX and a few other things now
waits for child processes to avoid creating zombies.  That it didn't,
before, was a bug discovered during Kleknev development.

* IDSgrep 0.4, released a few days before this version of Tsukurimashou, now
incorporates experimental bit vector indices.  This is actually a pretty big
deal; it is cutting-edge computer science research from which I hope to gain
many prestigious academic publications.  From a user's point of view,
though, the practical consequence is simply that IDSgrep should now run a
lot faster.  See the IDSgrep documentation for more about the bit vector
indices.

* Shortly after the release of Tsukurimashou~0.8, I will be giving a
presentation about the project at TUG~2013, the TeX Users Group annual
meeting, in Tokyo.  That should raise the profile of the project a bit.

* Since May 2013, I am unemployed and looking for work.  That may have
consequences eventually.  The fact that I am still single really worries me
more, but both are important.
