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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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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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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Indic Language Computing Workout, Pune
Posted on August 23, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
On 22nd August, I conducted a workout session with Praveen on Indic Language Computing at Red Hat Office, Pune. The plan was to solve some of the issues in Devanagari support for the encoding converter Payyans. But most of the time was spent on Introducing the concepts of Indic language computing to participants. Project Silpa was also introduced and demonstrated. Students from College of Engg, Pune and other colleges attended. Red Hat sponsored the venue at their office.
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Wikimania 2010, Poland
Posted on July 17, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
I left Chennai on Wednesday(8th) and reached Frankfurt airport on Thursday morning. Rest of the people from India for wikimania- Shiju Alex, Tinu Cherian, Srinivas Gunta, Arjun Rao were already reached the airport and I joined them. We reached Gdansk Airport by 12.30 PM. Our accommodation was at a students hostel of Gdansk University. Language was a big issue since most of the people does not understand English and only know Polish Language.
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Attending Wikimania 2010
Posted on July 6, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
I will be attending Wikimania 2010, Gdansk, Poland. This annual international conference of the Wikimedia community is from July 9 to July 11.
I will be presenting wik2cd, the tool I wrote for Malayalam wikipedia version 1.0 there in a joint workshop with wikipedia offline developers. I will be joining with Manuel Schneider, Shiju Alex, Martin Walker in the workshop titled: Creating offline version of Wiki content – Solutions and Challenges.
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Conferences : FOSS.IN and NCIDEEE
Posted on November 28, 2009
| Santhosh Thottingal
FOSS.IN 2009 starts on 1st December. I wanted to attend all 5 days but I have another conference on Dec 1st to 3rd at Chennai. I am attending National Conference on ICTs for the differently- abled/under privileged communities in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship 2009 – (NCIDEEE 2009) at Loyola College, Chennai. So I will miss the first 3 days of foss.in.
We have a workout on Project Silpa during foss.in. I am also planning to have a workout with Debayan and Jinesh to get his tesseract-indic OCR work with Malayalam.
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Openoffice Indic Regional Language group
Posted on May 27, 2009
| Santhosh Thottingal
We just formed Indic Regional Language group for Openoffice. This is as per the Openoffice Native Language Consortium Plans. The objectives of such groups can be read from here. Basically the group is meant for better coordination among Indic languages to make Openoffice experience in our language better.
The announcement of this group is here
Thanks to Charles-H. Schulz, we got a mailing list indic@native-lang.openoffice.org. To subscribe login to http://native-lang.openoffice.org
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Localization: What are we missing?
Posted on March 26, 2009
| Santhosh Thottingal
[This blog post is kind of self criticism and written not forgetting the valuable contribution that l10n communities are doing. ]
Some observations on the Localized desktops in Indian Languages
Not all localization team members try the application that he/she translate at least once before working on the PO file. Result: If somebody does the localization without understanding what the application does and try the en_US interface, he/she miss the context of the strings.
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