Manjari Font

 Posted on July 23, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I am happy to announce the new Malayalam font I was designing for past several months. The new font is named “Manjari”. Malayalam blogpost: https://blog.smc.org.in/manjari-font/ Malayalam script is known for its curly characters with beautiful loops. Encoded in unicode around 2001, it is relatively new to the digital age. The script has been evolving from rectangle shaped to oval shaped types of varying proportions. The popular culture is more of oval/ellipse shaped curves, mainly because writing methods using stensils or pens demanded less sharp corners. [Read More]

Redesigned font download page of SMC

 Posted on April 6, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

The font preview and download page of SMC has a fresh look now. The intention is to provide a font preview, typography showcase, download site in single page. Every font has multiple illustrations of usage and the text used is editable if you want to try your own text there. The old page which was also designed by myself was not mobile friendly. It provides a single page view to compare the fonts, each represented as cards. [Read More]
design  typography  web  webfonts 

Fontconfig language matching

 Posted on March 4, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I had to spend a few hours to debug a problem about fontconfig not identifiying a font for a language. Following the tradition of sharing the knowledge you acquired in hard way, let me note it down here for search engines. The font that I am designing now has 3 style variants, thin, regular and bold. All has same family name. So if you set this family for whatever purpose, depending on context, thin, regular or bold versions will be picked up. [Read More]
fontconfig  fonts  typography 

Making of Keraleeyam font: From ASCII to Unicode

 Posted on December 26, 2014  |  Kavya Manohar

Keraleeyam is a new unicode malayalam font designed for titles. It was originally designed in 2005 for ‘Keraleeyam’, a magazine supporting environmental movements in Kerala, with ASCII encoding and was distributed along with Rachana editor software. Unicode font feature tables for malayalam are complex, which include diverse rules for ligature formation and glyph positioning. Keraleeyam which was originally ASCII encoded, contained no such rules. It would have been a herculian task to manually add the rules for each glyph. [Read More]

New handwriting style font for Malayalam: Chilanka

 Posted on October 27, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A new handwriting style font for Malayalam is in development. The font is named as “Chilanka”(ചിലങ്ക). This is a alpha version release. Following is a sample rendering. More samples here. You may try the font using this edtiable page http://smc.org.in/downloads/fonts/chilanka/tests/ -It has the font embedded Download the latest version: http://smc.org.in/downloads/fonts/chilanka/Chilanka.ttf Font license: Free licensed font, OFL. Source code: https://github.com/smc/Chilanka Tools used for drawing: Inkscape and fontforge Chilanka/ചിലങ്ക is a musical anklet [Read More]
fonts  Malayalam