Malayalam

Six years back I wrote a javascript version of popular Swanalekha input method. Friends were requesting web based version that they can use in Windows platforms too. Swanalekha was initially written as a SCIM input method and later m17n input method, readily available in GNU/Linux platform. I had provided a bookmarklet version too. Later Rajiv Nair and Nishan Nasir wrote Chrome and Firefox extensions. Yesterday I noticed that the updated Marunadan Malayali news portal using my javascript library to power Malayalam input method in their search boxes. I don’t track who else or how many use these libraries and tools. But I quickly realized how bad the code is. Or in other words, How better I can write them today. 6 years is a long span of time anyway. ...

XeTeX is an extension of TeX with built-in support for Unicode and OpenType. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to typeset Malayalam using XeTeX. With some learning effort, we can produce high quality typesetting using XeTeX. Installing XeTeX XeTeX is packaged for all famous GNU/Linux distros. The installation method depends your distro. For ease of installation and configuration, we suggest to use a TeXLive version 2012 or above – either standalone TeXLive distribution or install from your distribution’s package manager. Windows and OSX versions are also available. ...

How to configure Ubuntu 14.04 for typing in Malayalam

Also see Swanalekha input method documentation

NotoSansMalayalam is a font released by Google internationalization team under noto project. I was checking the glyphs of Malayalam and noted a number of spurious glyphs in the font It is interesting because the font attempted to provide a minimal Malayalam font with reduced glyph set. While attempting that about 10% of the glyphs are either non-existing Malayalam glyphs(Glyphs with dot under consonants) or rarely used glyphs(Glyphs with U+0D62 MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC L) ...

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. ...

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. But it was an issue in Libreoffice, KDE and mainly in Windows where this kind of scaling feature does not work. Thanks to P Suresh for a rework on glyphs and fixing this issue. Rachana, Meera and Dyuthi had wrong glyphs used as placeholder glyphs. Bugs like these are fixed. Virama 0D4D had a wrong LSB that cause the cursor positioning and glyph boundary go wrong. Fixed that bug Atomic Chilu code points introduced in Unicode 5.1 was missing in all the fonts that SMC maintained because of the controversial decision by Unicode and SMC’s stand against that. Issues still exist, but content with code point is present, to avoid any difficulties to users, added those characters to Meera and Rachana fonts. 5. Rupee Symbols added to Meera and Rachana. Thanks to Hiran for designing Sans and Serif glyphs for Rupee. ...

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. So let me share the details of the project. ...

Recently, while preparing a critique for IDN Policy for Malayalam language prepared by CDAC, I noticed that ICANN does not allow control characters in the domain names. Sometime back I noticed Python 3 identifiers also does not allow control characters in the Identifiers. This blog post attempts to analyze the issue by looking at the Unicode and ICANN specifications about these special characters. Apart from the existing characters in Indic languages, Zero width Joiner and Zero width non joiners are widely used in Indic languages to control how the ligatures are formed. For some samples on how they are used, refer the wikipedia links. Being control characters and invisible characters, they are often removed while doing normalization , particularly before doing a string comparison, or collation (sort). ...

Recently we released two Jabber buddy bots for dictionary lookup. By adding [email protected] as a chat contact one can ask for the meaning of an English word in Malayalam by just sending a chat message. Similarly for English-Hindi or Hindi-English dictionary, we have another bot [email protected]. Both of these dictionaries use Dict databases based on DICT protocol. Both of these bots were well received by the users. We have 8000+ users for English-Malayalam Dictionary. Online blogs/media also gave good publicity. Thanks a lot!. ...