New handwriting style font for Malayalam: Chilanka

 Posted on October 27, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A new handwriting style font for Malayalam is in development. The font is named as “Chilanka”(ചിലങ്ക). This is a alpha version release. Following is a sample rendering. More samples here. You may try the font using this edtiable page http://smc.org.in/downloads/fonts/chilanka/tests/ -It has the font embedded Download the latest version: http://smc.org.in/downloads/fonts/chilanka/Chilanka.ttf Font license: Free licensed font, OFL. Source code: https://github.com/smc/Chilanka Tools used for drawing: Inkscape and fontforge Chilanka/ചിലങ്ക is a musical anklet [Read More]
fonts  Malayalam 

HOWTO: Wacom Bamboo CTH301K in Debian

 Posted on October 26, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

This is a short documentation on getting Wacom Bamboo CTH301K working in Debian. I use Debian Sid with Linux kernel 3.16 at the time of writing this. But this should work with latest Ubuntu(14.04 or 14.10) and new kernels. Wacom Bamboo CTH301K is an entry level touch pad with stylus – you can use it as a mouse, or drawing pad with stylus. It has multitouch features like pinch zoom and all. [Read More]
howto  tablet  wacom 

Updated Swanalekha JavaScript Library

 Posted on August 17, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Six years back I wrote a javascript version of popular Swanalekha input method. Friends were requesting web based version that they can use in Windows platforms too. Swanalekha was initially written as a SCIM input method and later m17n input method, readily available in GNU/Linux platform. I had provided a bookmarklet version too. Later Rajiv Nair and Nishan Nasir wrote Chrome and Firefox extensions. Yesterday I noticed that the updated Marunadan Malayali news portal using my javascript library to power Malayalam input method in their search boxes. [Read More]
input_methods  js  swanalekha 

Video of our presentation from 7th Multilingual Workshop by W3C

 Posted on August 16, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Video of our presentation from 7th Multilingual Workshop by W3C, Madrid, Spain, May 7-8 https://www.youtube.com/embed/_tNancNqFIQ Best Practices on the Design of Translation- Pau Giner, David Chan and Santhosh Thottingal. Abstract: Wikipedia is one of the most multilingual projects on the web today. In order to provide access to knowledge to everyone, Wikipedia is available in more than 280 languages. However, the coverage of topics and detail varies from language to language. [Read More]
talk  translation  w3c  wikimedia 

Typesetting Malayalam using XeTeX

 Posted on July 20, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

XeTeX is an extension of TeX with built-in support for Unicode and OpenType. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to typeset Malayalam using XeTeX. With some learning effort, we can produce high quality typesetting using XeTeX. Installing XeTeX XeTeX is packaged for all famous GNU/Linux distros. The installation method depends your distro. For ease of installation and configuration, we suggest to use a TeXLive version 2012 or above – either standalone TeXLive distribution or install from your distribution’s package manager. [Read More]
TeX  xetex 

Frequency modulation in gnu-octave : square wave carrier and sinusoidal message

 Posted on May 31, 2014  |  Kavya Manohar

Frequency modulation is a common analog modulation technique. Here the instantaneous frequency of the carrier wave is varied with the instantaneous amplitude of the message signal. That is the information regarding the message is available in the frequency of the carrier. It is a kind of more generic technique called angle modulation. [][1]Sinusoidal frequency modulation of square wave carrier Gnu-octave has built-in function fmmod() available in octave-communications package for implementing frequency modulation. [Read More]
Frequency modulation  gnu-octave  Signal Processing