Introducing Nupuram, new Malayalam typeface
Posted on October 5, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
I am happy to introduce Nupuram, a new Malayalam typeface that I have been designing and developing for several months. The typeface is not ready for a stable release, but pre-release versions are available for early testing.
Nupuram is a superfamily typeface. Nupuram variable font Taking full advantage of variable font technology, Nupuram offers an unprecedented level of flexibility, all from a single font file. Nupuram has 4 variation axes: Weight, Width, Slant and Softness.
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Gayathri 1.20 released
Posted on May 14, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
A new version of Gayathri typeface is available now. Version 1.20 comes with a few bugfixes and glyph additions.
New version is available at SMC website for preview and download.
Changes Fix the size issue of fullstop and comma Add 0D7B+0D4D+0D31 based ന്റ Improve kerning for latin Add 22 latin glyphs Fix spacing issues for quote signs Flatten the nested components Update build dependencies and CI The latest version is not yet available at Google fonts.
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Using Manjari as new orthography Malayalam font
Posted on October 29, 2021
| Santhosh Thottingal
Manjari is a traditional orthography font for Malayalam. It has large set of ligatures, vowel signs like /u/ get attached to its corresponding consonants to form ligatures. But, sometimes there are requirements to illustrate new orthography Malayalam content in Manjari. Recently, Manjari was used to typeset an academic book related to Malayalam script and it was required to show some content in new orthography with detached vowel signs and detached reph signs.
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Manjari - 4th anniversary
Posted on July 23, 2020
| Santhosh Thottingal
A rough drawing I did in 2014 November 20 and shared with my friends as a new font idea. I got this concept from my explorations about perfect curves in Malayalam script after I released Chilanka font. I spent all my free time from then onwards till releasing Manjari typeface on 23rd July 2016 by making it as perfect as I can. I took two months time off from my job in 2016 to complete this work too.
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Manjari version 1.800 released
Posted on April 11, 2020
| Santhosh Thottingal
A new version of Manjari Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.800 adds tabular number and slashed zero opentype features along with bug fixes.
New version of the font is available at: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#manjari
Tabular numbers The Kerala health department publishes daily COVID-19 reports and they use Manjari(example). Sometimes the numbers in table in Manjari font is slightly difficult to read when you want to compare the numbers in columns across rows.
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Chilanka font version 1.500 released
Posted on March 21, 2020
| Santhosh Thottingal
A new version of Chilanka Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.500 adds glyphs required to support International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
New version of the font is available at: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#chilanka
Chilanka was the first typeface I designed in 2014 for Malayalam. The usecase I had in mind while designing it was to use it in comic or non-serious contexts. But once it was released, contrary to my expectation, people used for serious Malayalam writing.
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Chilanka version 1.400 released
Posted on June 5, 2019
| Santhosh Thottingal
A new version of Chilanka typeface is available now. Version 1.400 is available for download from SMC’s font download and preview site smc.org.in/fonts
For users, there is not much changes, but the source and code build system got a major upgrade.
Source code updated to UFO format from fontforge sfd format. This allows to work with modern font editors. Use cubic beziers for master design, generate OTF along with TTF. The original drawings for Chilanka was using cubic beziers.
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Gayathri – New Malayalam typeface
Posted on February 21, 2019
| Santhosh Thottingal
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing is proud to announce Gayathri – a new typeface for Malayalam. Gayathri is designed by Binoy Dominic, opentype engineering by Kavya Manohar and project coordination by Santhosh Thottingal.
This typeface was financially supported by Kerala Bhasha Institute, a Kerala government agency under cultural department. This is the first time SMC work with Kerala Government to produce a new Malayalam typeface.
Gayathri is a display typeface, available in Regular, Bold, Thin style variants.
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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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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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