Malayalam morphology analyser – status update
Posted on August 11, 2018
| Santhosh Thottingal
For the last several months, I am actively working on the Malayalam morphology analyser project. In case you are not familiar with the project, my introduction blog post is a good start. I was always skeptical about the approach and the whole project as such looked very ambitious. But, now I am almost confident that the approach is viable. I am making good progress in the project, so this is some updates on that.
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How to customize Malayalam fonts in Linux
Posted on August 10, 2018
| Santhosh Thottingal
Now a days GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora etc comes with pre-configured fonts for Malayalam. For Sans-serif family, it is Meera and for serif, it is Rachana. If you like to change these fonts, there is no easy way to do with configuration tools in Gnome or KDE. They provide a general font selector for the whole desktop, but not for a given language.
The advantage of setting these preference at system level is, you don’t need to choose this fonts at application level then.
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യുവാക്കളുടെ തൊഴിലഭിമാനവും തൊഴിൽ സൊസൈറ്റികളും
Posted on July 29, 2018
| Santhosh Thottingal
നമ്മുടെ നാട്ടിലെ യുവാക്കൾ നേരിടുന്ന ഒരു പ്രതിസന്ധിയെപ്പറ്റിയും അതിന് പരിഹാരമായേക്കാവുന്ന ഒരാശയത്തെപ്പറ്റിയും എഴുതിയ ഒരു കുറിപ്പാണിതു്.
നമ്മുടെ നാട്ടിൽ സവിശേഷ നൈപുണികൾ ആവശ്യമുള്ള പലതരത്തിലുള്ള കൂലിപ്പണികൾ, ഡ്രൈവിങ്ങ്, കൃഷിപ്പണികൾ, പെയിന്റിങ്ങ്, കെട്ടിടനിർമാണം, മെക്കാനിക് തുടങ്ങിയ ജോലികളിൽ ഏർപ്പെടുന്ന യുവാക്കൾ ധാരാളമുണ്ട്. ഇവരെല്ലാം മിക്കപ്പൊഴും അസംഘടിത മേഖലയിലാണുതാനും. സർക്കാർ, സ്വകാര്യ ജോലി നേടാത്തതോ നേടാനാവശ്യമായ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമില്ലാത്തവരോ ആയ യുവാക്കളായ പുരുഷന്മാരാണ് ഇവയിലധികവും. പക്ഷേ യുവതികൾ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം പരമാവധി വിവാഹം വരെ തുടർന്ന് പിന്നീട് കുടുംബജീവിതത്തിൽ എത്തിച്ചേരുകയാണ്. ഇരുപതിനും മുപ്പത്തഞ്ചിനും ഇടക്ക് പ്രായമുള്ള ഇവർ പുതിയൊരു വെല്ലുവിളി നേരിടുന്നുണ്ട്. അതിനെപ്പറ്റി വിശദമായ ഒരു പഠനറിപ്പോർട്ട് ഈയിടെ സമകാലിക മലയാളം വാരിക പ്രസിദ്ധീകരിച്ചിരുന്നു(നിത്യഹരിത വരൻമാർ-രേഖാചന്ദ്ര, സമകാലിക മലയാളം ജൂലൈ 16).
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The many forms of ചിരി ☺️
Posted on July 15, 2018
| Santhosh Thottingal
This is an attempt to list down all forms of Malayalam word ചിരി(meaning: ☺️, smile, laugh). For those who are unfamiliar with Malayalam, the language is a highly inflectional Dravidian language. I am actively working on a morphology analyser(mlmorph) for the language as outlined in one of my previous blogpost.
I prepared this list as a test case for mlmorph project to evaluate the grammar rule coverage. So I thought of listing it here as well with brief comments.
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How to type Malayalam using Keyman 10 and Mozhi
Posted on July 3, 2018
| Santhosh Thottingal
This is a quick tutorial on installing Mozhi input method in Windows 10.
Mozhi is a transliteration based keyboard for Malayalam. You can type malayaalam to get മലയാളം for example. We will use Keyman tool as the input tool. Keyman input tool is an opensource input mechanism now developed by SIL. It supports lot of languages and Mozhi malayalam is one of that.
Step 1: Download Keyman desktop with Mozhi Malayalam keyboard Go to https://keyman.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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