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.
