Blogs

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. If this is what standards can achieve, what can I say?

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) ...

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. ...

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. The Hyphenator library helps to insert Soft hyphens in appropriate positions inside the text. ...

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. But it was an issue in Libreoffice, KDE and mainly in Windows where this kind of scaling feature does not work. Thanks to P Suresh for a rework on glyphs and fixing this issue. Rachana, Meera and Dyuthi had wrong glyphs used as placeholder glyphs. Bugs like these are fixed. Virama 0D4D had a wrong LSB that cause the cursor positioning and glyph boundary go wrong. Fixed that bug Atomic Chilu code points introduced in Unicode 5.1 was missing in all the fonts that SMC maintained because of the controversial decision by Unicode and SMC’s stand against that. Issues still exist, but content with code point is present, to avoid any difficulties to users, added those characters to Meera and Rachana fonts. 5. Rupee Symbols added to Meera and Rachana. Thanks to Hiran for designing Sans and Serif glyphs for Rupee. ...

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. Unlike EOT, WOFF, TTF formats , SVG is plain text uncompressed file. ...

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. So let me share the details of the project. ...

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.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-May/065537.html Niklas Laxström and Siebrand reviewed the WebFonts extension and enabled at translatewiki.net. Fixed a few bugs that Niklas reported on the extension. Purodha Blissenbach was very much interested in the WebFonts and Narayam extensions, we discussed some of the features we need to add. We have it here: Bug 28900 , Bug 28999 and Bug 29000

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.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/saz and Mediawiki localization started in translatewiki Since the language did not have any proper fonts or input tools, this was not going well. ...

A demo of cross language approximate search in Indic text: The Malayalam word സാമ്പാര്‍ is compared against a paragraph from http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambar. In the bottom half, words marked in yellow color are search results. You can see that a Kannada word ಸಾಂಬಾರ್‍ is matched for Malayalam word. And that is why this is called cross-language. The inflections of the words സാമ്പാര്‍ – സാമ്പാറും, സാമ്പാറു etc are also found as results. This is the kind of search we need in Indic languages, not just the letter by letter comparison we do for English. ...