SMC

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. ...

Sayahna Foundation had prepared a single page documentation of Swanalekha input method in PDF format. Since I often get emails about the key mapping, I am sharing it here. PDF: http://thottingal.in/documents/swanalekha.pdf Swanalekha Malayalam input method documentation

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 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. But it did not had enough flexibility to showcase some fine usages of typography. ...

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.

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 A brief note on the workflow I used for font development is as follows ...

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. ...

How to configure Ubuntu 14.04 for typing in Malayalam

Also see Swanalekha input method documentation

I am a mentor for Google Summer of Code 2014 for SMC. I will be helping Praveen Sridhar to port input methods from jquery.ime to the Firefox OS. We started the project and Praveen already has a proof of concept ready. Tim Chien and Rudy Lu from Mozilla is co-mentoring the same project