Anniversary of Manjari font release

 Posted on July 23, 2017  |  Santhosh Thottingal

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. [Read More]
fonts  Malayalam 

Detailed font reports using fontreport tool

 Posted on January 1, 2017  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Google i18n team developed a tool to create detailed report of fonts. The tool named fontreport, produces a multi page PDF with Unicode coverage of the font, what glyphs are in it, what Open Type features it supports, available ligatures, and glyph substitutions. Optionally the tool can also create plain text reports. The PDF is generated using TeX. Manjari font report generated using fontreport tool I found it very useful to create report for a dozen of fonts I maintain with Swathantha Malayalam Computing community. [Read More]
fonts 

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 

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 

Spurious glyphs in NotoSansMalayalam

 Posted on March 22, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

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) [Read More]
fonts 

Collaboratively edited documentation for Indic font developers

 Posted on January 11, 2014  |  Santhosh Thottingal

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. [Read More]
documentation  fonts  Indic  opentype  wikipedia 

New version of Malayalam fonts released

 Posted on March 10, 2012  |  Santhosh Thottingal

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. [Read More]
fonts  Malayalam  SMC  webfonts  wikipedia 

SVG Fonts

 Posted on August 20, 2011  |  Santhosh Thottingal

This post is some notes on the current state of SVG Fonts. SVG is not a webfont format. The purpose of SVG fonts is to be embedded inside of SVG documents (or linked to them), similar to the way you would embed standard TrueType or OpenType fonts in a PDF. SVG fonts are text files that contain the glyph outlines represented as standard SVG elements and attributes, as if they were single vector objects in the SVG image. [Read More]
css  fonts  svg  webfonts  wikipedia 

Creating a new Language ecosystem- Sourashtra as example

 Posted on May 7, 2011  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Sourashtra is a language spoken by Sourashtra people living in South Tamilnadu and Gujarat of India. Originated from Brahmi and then Grandha, this language is mother tongue for half a million people. But most of them are not familiar with the script of this language. Very few people knows reading and writing on Sourashtra script. Sourashtra has a ISO 639-3 language code saz and Unicode range U+A880 – U+A8DF Recently Sourashtra wikipedia project was started in the wikimedia incubator : http://incubator. [Read More]
fonts  glibc  sourashtra  wikipedia