Using Manjari as new orthography Malayalam font

 Posted on October 29, 2021  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Manjari is a traditional orthography font for Malayalam. It has large set of ligatures, vowel signs like /u/ get attached to its corresponding consonants to form ligatures. But, sometimes there are requirements to illustrate new orthography Malayalam content in Manjari. Recently, Manjari was used to typeset an academic book related to Malayalam script and it was required to show some content in new orthography with detached vowel signs and detached reph signs. [Read More]
Manjari  opentype  malayalam 

One million Wikipedia articles by translation

 Posted on October 22, 2021  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I am happy to share a news from my work at Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikipedia article translation system, known as Content Translation reached a milestone of creating one million articles. Since 2015, this is my major project at WMF and I am lead engineer for the project. The Content Translation system helps Wikipedia editors to quickly translate and publish articles from one language wiki to another. This way, the knowledge gap between different languages are reduced. [Read More]
Wikipedia 

New version of Malayalam morphology analyser

 Posted on March 20, 2021  |  Santhosh Thottingal

In the previous blog post I explained my efforts to modernize SFST. Since I publishedSFST python binding and modernized to make it compile in all operating systems, next step was to drop HFST dependency of mlmorph and use the new version of SFST 1.5.0. mlmorph 1.3.0 has no dependency on HFST and all installation problems in different operating systems and python versions are solved now. Latest version is also available in pypi. [Read More]
mlmorph  fst 

New version of Stuttgart Finite State Transducer

 Posted on March 20, 2021  |  Santhosh Thottingal

The Malayalam morphology analyser(mlmorph) I am actively developing since 2016 is based on Stuttgart Finite State Transducer(SFST) formalism. SFST was developed by Dr Helmut Schmid. Since SFST had minimal developer apis and no functional python APIs, I was using Helsinki Finite State Transducer(HFST) toolkit. HFST has python binding and better tooling and development support. HFST has SFST backend so there was no issue in using SFST formalism. But HFST development has slowed down in past years. [Read More]
mlmorph  fst 

New version of Manjari Typeface released

 Posted on March 19, 2021  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A new version of Manjari Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 2.000 comes with a few bugfixes and glyph additions. Most of the changes are based on a review by Google fonts team. New version is available at SMC website for preview and download. Changes Design correction for Malayalam number 10 to better match the attestations (0d6b0fc2) Avoid glyphs that use components that are components themself (6fe9b35d) Add ligatures glyphs for ൻ + ് + റ version of nta (2c39ae08) Review and update diacritics alignment (c498245d) Rename License. [Read More]
manjari  fonts  releases 

Tesseract OCR web interface

 Posted on November 14, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I prepared a web frontend for Tesseract OCR to do optical character recognition for Malayalam - https://ocr.smc.org.in

Ya, Ra signs producing same rendering irrespective of order in data.

This application uses Tesseract.js, Javascript port of Tesseract.

You can use images with English or Malayalam content. Use the editor and the spellchecker for proofreading the text recognized.

Your image does not leave your browser since the recognition is done in browser and does not use any remote servers.

Source code: https://gitlab.com/smc/tesseract-ocr-web

malayalam  ocr 

Fixing a bug in Malayalam ya, ra, va sign rendering

 Posted on November 13, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

In Malayalam, the Ya, Va and Ra consonant signs when appeared together has an interesting problem. The Ra sign(്ര also known as reph) is prebase sign, meaning, it goes to left side of the consonant or conjunct to which it applies. The Ya sign(്യ) and Va sign(്വ) are post base, meaning it goes to the right side of consonant or conjunct to which it applies. So, after a consonant or conjunct, if Ra sign and Ya sign is present, Ra sign goes to left and Ya sign remain to the right. [Read More]
malayalam  typography  opentype 

English Malayalam Translation using OpusMT

 Posted on November 1, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

SMC had started a machine translation service at translate.smc.org.in for English-Malayalam. This system uses huggingface transformers with OpusMT language models for translation. OPUS MT provides pre-trained neural translation models trained on OPUS data. These models can seamlessly run with the OPUS-MT transation servers that can be installed from our OPUS-MT github repository. The translation service is powered by Marian Neural MT engine The quality of the machine translation depends on the availability of parallel corpus. [Read More]
malayalam  machine-translation 

Web application for learning Malayalam writing

 Posted on November 1, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

In my previous blog post, I wrote about an experiment of using SVG path animation to help learn malayalam letter writing. That prototype application was well received by many people and that encouraged me to host it as a proper application. Now, the Malayalam learning application is available at https://learn.smc.org.in Source code: https://gitlab.com/smc/mlmash I added all letters of Malayalam there. Added a few common ligatures too. Kavya helped to record and add pronunication of these letters with couple of examples. [Read More]
malayalam  learning  svg 

Animated SVGs for learning Malayalam writing

 Posted on October 27, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I wanted to make an educational typeface with writing directions in each glyphs. Something like this: But considering the effort it takes I was bit confused whether it is really necessary to have a typeface or just images like this will suffice. Recently, I read about SVG path animations and I thought animating the path inside each letters will be more helpful than static image with drawing directions. [Read More]
malayalam  learning  svg