Kindle supports custom fonts

 Posted on July 1, 2018  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I am pleasantly surprised to see that Amazon Kindle now supports installing custom fonts. A big step towards supporting non-latin content in their devices. I can now read Malayalam ebooks in my kindle with my favorite fonts. [][1]Content rendered in Manjari font. Note that I installed Bold, Regular, Thin variants so that Kindle can pick up the right one This feature is introduced in Kindle 5.9.6.1 version released in June 2018. [Read More]
fonts  howto  Kindle  Malayalam 

Talk on ‘Malayalam orthographic reforms’ at Grafematik 2018

 Posted on June 21, 2018  |  Kavya Manohar

Santhosh and I presented a paper on ‘Malayalam orthographic reforms: impact on language and popular culture’ at Graphematik conference held at IMT Atlantique, Brest, France. Our session was chaired by Dr. Christa Dürscheid. The paper we presented is available here. The video of our presentation is available in youtube. Grafematik is a conference, first of its kind, bringing together disciplines concerned with writing systems and their representation in written communication. There were lot of interesting talks on various scripts around the world, their digital representation, role of Unicode, typeface design and so on. [Read More]
conference  Malayalam  Script 

u and uː vowel signs of Malayalam

 Posted on April 15, 2018  |  Kavya Manohar

The reformed or simplified orthographic script style of Malayalam was introduced in 1971 by this government order. This is what is taught in schools. The text book content is also in reformed style. The prevailing academic situation does not facilitate the students to learn the exhaustive and rich orthographic set of Malayalam script. At the same time they observe a lot of wall writings, graffiti, bill-boards and handwriting sticking to the exhaustive orthographic set. [Read More]
Malayalam  Orthography  Script  typography 

Typoday 2018

 Posted on March 4, 2018  |  Kavya Manohar

Santhosh and I jointly presented a paper at Typoday 2018. The paper was titled ‘Spiral splines in typeface design: A case study of Manjari Malayalam typeface’. The full paper is available here. The presentation is available here.

Typoday is the annual conference where typographers and graphic designers from academia and industry come up with their ideas and showcase their work. Typoday 2018 was held at Convocation Hall, University of Mumbai.

 

conference  Manjari  typoday 

Manjari 1.5 version released

 Posted on February 10, 2018  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A new version of Manjari typeface is available now. Version 1.5 is mainly a bug fix release. In version 1.3, the build tooling of the project was changed from fontforge to fontmake. Two weeks back a few people reported that the font no longer works in MS Word and Wordpad. Font selector lists the font, but when selected, the content remains same. It works in all other applications without any issues. [Read More]
Manjari 

മലയാളത്തിലെ ‘ഉ’കാര ചിഹ്നങ്ങൾ

 Posted on January 12, 2018  |  Kavya Manohar

പരിഷ്കരിച്ച മലയാള ലിപിയാണല്ലോ ഇന്നു പാഠപുസ്തകത്തിലുള്ളതും വിദ്യാലയങ്ങളിൽ പഠിപ്പിക്കുന്നതും. അതുകൊണ്ടു തന്നെ ഔപചാരിക വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിൽ മലയാളത്തിന്റെ തനതുലിപിയുടെ ശൈലീഭേദങ്ങൾ പരിചയിക്കുവനുള്ള അവസരം നമുക്കു കിട്ടാറില്ല. പക്ഷേ ചുമരെഴുത്തുകളിലും, ബസ്സിലെ ബോർഡുകളിലും, തനതുമലയാളം എഴുതിശീലിച്ച മുതിർന്നവരുടെ കയ്യെഴുത്തിലുമൊക്കെയായി ഈ ലിപിരൂപങ്ങൾ നമ്മുടെ മുന്നിലുണ്ടു താനും. ലിപിപരിഷ്കരണത്തിന്റെ ഭാഗമായി വേർപെട്ട കൂട്ടക്ഷരങ്ങൾ മിക്കതും തെറ്റുകളൊന്നുമില്ലാതെ നമ്മുടെ കയ്യെഴുത്തുകളിൽ അറിഞ്ഞോ അറിയാതെയോ കൂടിച്ചേരാറുണ്ട്. പക്ഷേ വേർപെട്ട ചിഹ്നങ്ങൾ, പ്രത്യേകിച്ച് ു, ൂ ചിഹ്നങ്ങൾ വ്യഞ്ജനത്തോടു ചേർത്തെഴുതുമ്പോൾ ശൈലികൾ കൂടിക്കുഴഞ്ഞ് പോവുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. ചുവടെയുള്ള ചിത്രം നോക്കുക. ഉ-ചിഹ്നങ്ങളുടെ ഉപയോഗം ചുമരെഴുത്തിൽ. പച്ചയടയാളത്തിനുള്ളിൽ പരിഷ്കരിച്ച ലിപി, നീലയിൽ തനതു ലിപി എന്നിവ കാണാം. ചുവന്ന അടയാളമിട്ടു സൂചിപ്പിച്ചിരിക്കുന്നത് മലയാളത്തിൽ പതിവില്ലാത്ത ശൈലിയാണ്. [Read More]
Malayalam  Script 

Stylistic Alternates for ച്ച, ള്ള in Manjari and Chilanka fonts

 Posted on January 6, 2018  |  Santhosh Thottingal

The ligatures for the Malayalam conjuncts ച്ച, ള്ള have less popular variants as shown below The second form is not seen in print but often in handwritten Malayalam. I have seen it a lot in bus boards especially at Thiruvananthapuram. There are no digital typefaces with the second style, except the Chilanka font I designed. It uses the second variant of ച്ച. I got lot of appreciation for that style variant, but also recieved request for the first form of ച്ച. [Read More]
fonts  inkscape  libreoffice  Manjari  xetex 

Number spellout and generation in Malayalam using Morphology analyser

 Posted on December 10, 2017  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Writing a number 6493 as six thousand four hundred and ninety three is known as spellout of that number. The most familiar example of this is in cheques. Text to speech systems also need to convert numbers to words. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sample_cheque.jpeg by User:Tshrinivasan The reverse process of this, to convert a phrase like six thousand four hundred and ninety three to number 6493 – the number generation, is also common. In software, it is often required in Speech recognition and in general any kind of semantic analysis of text. [Read More]
Malayalam  morphology 

Towards a Malayalam morphology analyser

 Posted on November 26, 2017  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Malayalam is a highly inflectional and agglutinative language. This has posed a challenge for all kind of language processing. Algorithmic interpretation of Malayalam’s words and their formation rules continues to be an untackled problem. My own attempts to study and try out some of these characteristics was big failure in the past. Back in 2007, when I tried to develop a spellchecker for Malayalam, the infinite number of words this language can have by combining multiple words together and those words inflected was a big challenge. [Read More]
morphology