Brackets, my favorite javascript IDE
Posted on March 30, 2014
| Santhosh Thottingal
I use Brackets for web development. I had tried several other IDEs but Brackets is my current favorite IDE. A few things I liked is listed below
It is free software licensed under the MIT License written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript Availability of large number of extensions Some extensions I use with Brackets are:
Markdown Preview for easy editing of markdown Brackets Git for git integration Themes for Brackets For Monokai Darksoda theme I use Brackets Linux UI Interactive Linter realtime JSHint/JSLint/CoffeeLint reports into brackets as you work on your code WD Minimap for SublimeText like code overview Beautify for automatic code formatting as you save using jsbeautify Beautify extension helps me a lot because most of the MediaWiki related code I write needs be as MediaWiki javascript coding convention.
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NotoSansMalayalam and nta
Posted on March 22, 2014
| Santhosh Thottingal
NotoSansMalayalam has the following ligature rules for ന്റ (nta)- All uses Akhand Opentype feature
uni0D7B(ൻ) + uni0D4D(്) + uni0D31(റ) => ൻ + ് + റ uni0D28(ന) + uni0D4D(്) + uni200D(ZWNJ) +uni0D31(റ) => ന് + റ uni0D28(ന) + uni0D4D(്) + uni0D31(റ) => ന് +റ The first one is what is defined in Unicode chapter 09 section 9.9[pdf]. The second is what Microsoft Kartika used to use for /nta/ as a bug. The last one is what all other fonts follows.
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Spurious glyphs in NotoSansMalayalam
Posted on March 22, 2014
| Santhosh Thottingal
NotoSansMalayalam is a font released by Google internationalization team under noto project. I was checking the glyphs of Malayalam and noted a number of spurious glyphs in the font
It is interesting because the font attempted to provide a minimal Malayalam font with reduced glyph set. While attempting that about 10% of the glyphs are either non-existing Malayalam glyphs(Glyphs with dot under consonants) or rarely used glyphs(Glyphs with U+0D62 MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC L)
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Collaboratively edited documentation for Indic font developers
Posted on January 11, 2014
| Santhosh Thottingal
One of the integral building blocks for providing multilingual support for digital content are fonts. In current times, OpenType fonts are the choice. With the increasing need for supporting languages beyond the Latin script, the TrueType font specification was extended to include elements for the more elaborate writing systems that exist. This effort was jointly undertaken in the 1990s by Microsoft and Adobe. The outcome of this effort was the OpenType Specification – a successor to the TrueType font specification.
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Hyphenation in web
Posted on March 17, 2013
| Santhosh Thottingal
This is a follow up of a 4 year old blog post about hyphenation. Hyphenation allows the controlled splitting of words to improve the layout of paragraphs, typically splitting words at syllabic or morphemic boundaries and visually indicating the split (usually with a hyphen).
I wrote about how a webpage can use Hyphenator javascript library to achieve hyphenation for a text with ‘justify‘ style. Along with the hyphenation rules I wrote for many Indian languages, this solution works and some websites already use it.
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New version of Malayalam fonts released
Posted on March 10, 2012
| Santhosh Thottingal
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing project announced the release of new version of Malayalam unicode fonts this week. In this version, there are many improvements for popular Malayalam fonts Rachana and Meera. Dyuthi font has some bug fixes. I am listing the changes below.
Meera font was small compared to other fonts. This was not really a problem in Gnome environment since fontconfig allows you to define a scaling factor to match other font size.
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SVG Fonts
Posted on August 20, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
This post is some notes on the current state of SVG Fonts.
SVG is not a webfont format. The purpose of SVG fonts is to be embedded inside of SVG documents (or linked to them), similar to the way you would embed standard TrueType or OpenType fonts in a PDF. SVG fonts are text files that contain the glyph outlines represented as standard SVG elements and attributes, as if they were single vector objects in the SVG image.
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Malayalam Wikisource Offline version
Posted on June 11, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
Malayalam Wikisource community today released the first offline version of Malayalam wikisource during the 4th annual wiki meetup of Malayalam wikimedians. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a wikisource project release its offline version. Malayalam wiki community had released the first version of Malayalam wikipedia one year back.
Releasing the offline version of a wikisource is a challenging project. The technical aspects of the project was designed and implemented by myself.
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Mediawiki Berlin hackathon
Posted on May 17, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
I am just back from Mediawiki Berlin Hackathon. On May 13 to 15, Mediawiki developers attended the hackathon and squashed many bugs and discussed many features. Members of language committee had its first real-life meeting in parallel with hackathon. It was a nice event, learned a lot, talked to many awesome hackers and linguists.
Milos Rancic has written a summary of the discussions happened during language committee meeting here : http://lists.
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Creating a new Language ecosystem- Sourashtra as example
Posted on May 7, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
Sourashtra is a language spoken by Sourashtra people living in South Tamilnadu and Gujarat of India. Originated from Brahmi and then Grandha, this language is mother tongue for half a million people. But most of them are not familiar with the script of this language. Very few people knows reading and writing on Sourashtra script. Sourashtra has a ISO 639-3 language code saz and Unicode range U+A880 – U+A8DF
Recently Sourashtra wikipedia project was started in the wikimedia incubator : http://incubator.
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