Tamil Computing Virtual Meetup

 Posted on August 9, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Today(August 09, 2020), Tamil Virtual Academy organized a virual meetup on Tamil computing and its roadmap. This full day event had 18 sessions presented by various people working on Tamil computing. Event was chaired by T. Udhayachandran IAS, Director of TVU. I was also invited for the program. I talked about potentially collaboration of Tamil and Malayalam computing communities to solve common problems. Opensource based language computing helps to accelerate language computing in both languages by such collaboration. [Read More]

Manjari - 4th anniversary

 Posted on July 23, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A rough drawing I did in 2014 November 20 and shared with my friends as a new font idea. I got this concept from my explorations about perfect curves in Malayalam script after I released Chilanka font. I spent all my free time from then onwards till releasing Manjari typeface on 23rd July 2016 by making it as perfect as I can. I took two months time off from my job in 2016 to complete this work too. [Read More]

Morphology analyser based spellchecker - Web version

 Posted on June 20, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I prepared a web frontend for the Malayalam spellchecker based on the Malayalam morphology analyser. It is available at https://morph.smc.org.in/spellcheck. I had written an article about its technology two years ago. There s also an incomplete extension to LibreOffice. The spellchecker is available as an API too. If you want to use it, please refer a minimal code snippet available at codepen. The quality of spellcheck and suggestions provided depend on the completeness of mlmorph project. [Read More]

Video interviews on SMC and FOSS

 Posted on June 20, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

While the COVID-19 pandemic is going on, Kerala free software communities started doing interview series with active contributors. The interviews were very informal and was about personal journey and the story behind the projects. And they were all in Malayalam. I gave 3 such interviews in last few weeks. I am going to list them in this blog post. Humans of SMC Series This was an initiative by Tinkerhub, a non-profit organization which promotes the creation of tech-talent focused among youth, especially students. [Read More]

ഡിജിറ്റൽ സാക്ഷരതാ പദ്ധതി

 Posted on May 30, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

കേരളത്തിന്റെ സാക്ഷരതാപ്രസ്ഥാനത്തിന്റെ തുടർച്ചയായി സാർവത്രിക ഡിജിറ്റൽ സാക്ഷരതാ പദ്ധതിയ്ക്കായി ചില ശ്രമങ്ങൾ 2019 സെപ്റ്റംബർ മുതൽ ഞാൻ നടത്തിയിരുന്നു. സർക്കാറിന്റെയും മറ്റുസ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടെയും ആഭിമുഖ്യത്തിൽ ആ പദ്ധതി മാർച്ചിൽ തുടങ്ങാനിരിക്കെ കോവിഡ്-19 മഹാമാരി ഗുരുതരമാകുകയും പദ്ധതിയുടെ ഭാവി അനിശ്ചിതത്തിലാവുകയും ചെയ്തു. അതേ സമയം ഇത്തരമൊരു പദ്ധതിയുടെ ആവശ്യകത ഇരട്ടിക്കുകയും ചെയ്തു. പദ്ധതിയെപ്പറ്റി സർക്കാറിന്റെ ഔദ്യോഗികപ്രഖ്യാപനങ്ങൾ വന്നോട്ടെ എന്നുകരുതി ഞാൻ ഒന്നും പബ്ലിക്ക് ആയി എഴുതിയിരുന്നില്ല. പുതിയ സാഹചര്യത്തിൽ ഈ പദ്ധതിയ്ക്കുവേണ്ടിയുള്ള ഞാനടക്കമുള്ള ഒരുപാടുപേരുടെ പ്രയത്നത്തെ രേഖപ്പെടുത്താനാണ് ഈ ലേഖനം. തുടക്കം സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിന്റെ പ്രവർത്തനഫലങ്ങൾ കൂടുതൽ ആളുകളിലേക്കെത്തുകയും അതോടൊപ്പം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടർ, മൊബൈൽ, ഇന്റർനെറ്റ് തുടങ്ങിയവ എല്ലാവരും വ്യാപകമായി ഉപയോഗിക്കാൻ തുടങ്ങുകയും ചെയ്തതോടെ കഴിഞ്ഞ കുറേ വർഷങ്ങളായി എന്റെയും സുഹൃത്തുക്കളുടെയും നല്ലൊരുഭാഗം സമയം ഇതുസംബന്ധിച്ച സംശയനിവാരണത്തിനും സഹായങ്ങൾക്കുമായി മാറ്റിവെക്കേണ്ടിവരുന്നുണ്ട്. [Read More]

Life in the time of lockdown

 Posted on April 26, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

It has been more than a month since lockdown is announced in Kerala. The world has changed and never going to be same. I thought of leaving a write up here, mainly for future self to recollect how did I spend this time at home. Sunday, March 21st was general curfew in India. On the same day, Kavya’s grand father passed away at Thodupuzha. Since travel was not allowed on the day, we could not travel from Thiruvananthapuram to Thodupuzha. [Read More]

Manjari version 1.800 released

 Posted on April 11, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A new version of Manjari Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.800 adds tabular number and slashed zero opentype features along with bug fixes. New version of the font is available at: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#manjari Tabular numbers The Kerala health department publishes daily COVID-19 reports and they use Manjari(example). Sometimes the numbers in table in Manjari font is slightly difficult to read when you want to compare the numbers in columns across rows. [Read More]
fonts 

Chilanka font version 1.500 released

 Posted on March 21, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A new version of Chilanka Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.500 adds glyphs required to support International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration New version of the font is available at: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#chilanka Chilanka was the first typeface I designed in 2014 for Malayalam. The usecase I had in mind while designing it was to use it in comic or non-serious contexts. But once it was released, contrary to my expectation, people used for serious Malayalam writing. [Read More]
fonts 

Procrustes Analysis Based Handwriting Recognition

 Posted on February 29, 2020  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Many months back, I started an experiment to see if Malayalam handwriting recognition can be done in a non-machine learning based approach. This blog post explains the approach, the work done so far and results. Handwriting recognition can be done while the user is writing(called online handwriting recognition) and recognizing a sample somebody wrote in the past(offline recognition). Online and offline recognition problems are different problems. This is because, in online recognition, it is possible to capture additional details such as pen up, pen down, pen movement directions and rotations. [Read More]
handwriting  algorithms