SMC

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. ...

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!. ...