Projects

Writing a number 6493 as six thousand four hundred and ninety three is known as spellout of that number. The most familiar example of this is in cheques. Text to speech systems also need to convert numbers to words. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sample_cheque.jpeg by User:Tshrinivasan The reverse process of this, to convert a phrase like six thousand four hundred and ninety three to number 6493 – the number generation, is also common. In software, it is often required in Speech recognition and in general any kind of semantic analysis of text. ...

Malayalam is a highly inflectional and agglutinative language. This has posed a challenge for all kind of language processing. Algorithmic interpretation of Malayalam’s words and their formation rules continues to be an untackled problem. My own attempts to study and try out some of these characteristics was big failure in the past. Back in 2007, when I tried to develop a spellchecker for Malayalam, the infinite number of words this language can have by combining multiple words together and those words inflected was a big challenge. The dictionary based spellechecker was a failed attempt. I had documented these issues. ...

Scribus now has support for Malayalam hyphenation. I filed a bug report to add Malayalam hyphenation rules to Scribus and it is now added to scribus. The hyphenation rules are based on the TeX hyphenation patterns I wrote. How to use You need scribus 1.5.4 or later. It is not yet available as release while I am writing this. But once released you can get from https://www.scribus.net/downloads/ Start a new document. Add text frames and content. You will need narrow columns to have wordbreaking contexts. For example 2 columns as I use for demo here. Select the text and set font as a Malayalam font like Manjari, Set the language as Malayalam. In Hyphenation properties, set hyphenation character as blank, otherwise visible hyphens will appear. Set the text justified. From menu Extras->Hyphenate text. Done. ...

TruFont the font-editing application written with Python3, ufoLib, defcon and PyQt5 now has support for pasting SVG images as glyphs. It now also support drag and dropping SVG files. For my font design workflow I mainly use Inkscape to desgin master drawings and then use fonteditor for further editing. I am migrating the fonts we maintained to Trufont from Fontforge(It is no longer developed). But, not having SVG support with Trufont was a blocker for me. So today I filed two patches and got merged to Trufont master. ...

മഞ്ജരി ഫോണ്ടിന്റെ 1.3 പതിപ്പ് ഇപ്പോൾ ലഭ്യമാണു്. പ്രധാന മാറ്റങ്ങൾ ഇവയാണ്: കണ്ടീഷണൽ സ്റ്റാക്കിങ്ങ് സംവിധാനം കൂടുതൽ അക്ഷരരൂപങ്ങളിലേക്ക് കൊണ്ടുവന്നു. കൂടുതൽ വിവരങ്ങൾ സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് ബ്ലോഗിൽ: https://blog.smc.org.in/conditional-stacking/ ഫോണ്ട് ഇപ്പോൾ TTF നു പകരം OTF ഫോർമാറ്റിൽ ആണ് സ്വതവേ വരുന്നതു്. മഞ്ജരി രൂപകല്പന ചെയ്തത് OTF ഫോർമാറ്റ് മുന്നിൽ കണ്ടായിരുന്നെങ്കിലും(ക്യുബിക് ബെസിയർ കർവുകൾ) എല്ലാ ഓപ്പറേറ്റിങ്ങ് സിസ്റ്റങ്ങളിലും കുറ്റമറ്റതായി കാണാത്തതുകൊണ്ട് TTF ൽ ആയിരുന്നു ആദ്യം പുറത്തിറക്കിയതു്. ഇപ്പോൾ ആ പ്രശ്നങ്ങളൊക്കെ പരിഹരിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ടു്. TTF, Webfonts എന്നിവയും വേണമെങ്കിൽ ഡൌൺലോഡ് ചെയ്യാം. ഫോണ്ട് ഫോർജ് ആയിരുന്നു മഞ്ജരിയടക്കമുള്ള എല്ലാ ഫോണ്ടുകളും എഡിറ്റ് ചെയ്യാൻ ഞങ്ങൾ ഉപയോഗിച്ചിരുന്നതു്. വളരെ പഴയ ആ സോഫ്റ്റ്‌‌വെയർ അതിന്റെ ഡെവലപ്മെന്റ് പതിയെ നിർത്തുകയാണ്. Unified Font Object ഫോർമാറ്റിലേക്ക് എല്ലാ ഫോണ്ടുകളുടെയും സോഴ്സ് കോഡ് മാറുകയും Trufont പോലുള്ള പുതിയ എഡിറ്റർ വരുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നുണ്ട്. ഈ മാറ്റത്തിനൊപ്പം പോകാൻ ആദ്യമായി മഞ്ജരിയുടെ സോഴ്സ് കോഡ് UFO ഫോർമാറ്റിലേക്ക് മാറ്റി. ബാക്കി ഫോണ്ടുകളും പതിയെ അങ്ങനെ മാറ്റി ഫോണ്ട് ഫോർജുമായുള്ള ബന്ധം ഉപേക്ഷിക്കും. പുതിയ ഫോണ്ടുകൾ ഡൌൺലോഡ് ചെയ്യാൻ: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#manjari ...

GNU C library 2.26 released and proud to have my name listed under contributors. Two small patches for localedata were merged: Bug 19919 – iso14651_t1_common: Correct the Malayalam sorting order of 0D36 and 0D37 1. Bug 19922 – iso14651_t1_common: Define collation for Malayalam chillu characters

Today, July 23 marks one year anniversary of Manjari font release. Out of all my projects, this is the project that gave me highest satisfaction. I see people using it in social media every day for memes, banners, notices. I have seen the font used for Government publishings, notices, reports. I have seen wedding invitations, book covers, Movie titles with Manjari font. I am so happy that Malayalam speakers loved it. ...

I had developed and released hyphenation extension for Malayalam in Openoffice years back. Libreoffice was born later. Eventhough libreoffice supported the openoffice extensions, the extension repository is freshly created for libreoffice. The old extensions were not present in the libreoffice repository. Now, I have uploaded the Malayalam hyphenation extension in libreoffice extension repository too. I will explain the installation and configuration step by step in this blog post: All Operating systems Download an extension and save it anywhere on your computer. In LibreOffice, select Tools -> Extension Manager from the menu bar. In the Extension Manager dialog click Add. A file browser window opens. Navigate to the folder where you saved the LibreOffice extension file(s) on your system. The extension’s files have the file extension ‘OXT’. Find and select the extension you want to install and click Open. If this extension is already installed, you’ll be prompted to press OK to confirm whether to overwrite the current version by the new one, or press Cancel to stop the installation. After you are asked whether to install the extension only for your user or for all users. If you choose the Only for me option, the extension will be installed only for your user. If you choose For all users, you need system administrator rights. In this case the extension will be available for all users. In general, choose Only for me, that doesn’t require administration rights on the operating system. Debian and Ubuntu The above steps works for Debian and Ubuntu too. But there is a better way. Using your package manager install hyphen-ml package. This will install hyphenation not only for libreoffice, but for typesetting packages like LaTeX. ...

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. The character or ligature shapes has also been changing gradually towards the shapes that are easy with pens. The Manjari font takes that to another level by smoothening all curves to its maximum. ...

The hyphenation rules for Indian languages I maintain now relicensed to much permissive MIT license. This was a blocker for to get added to Android, and Firefox.