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. ...
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. Sharing the reports it created: ...
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. Regular is expected by default. Also when you pick the font from font selectors, you would expect, regular being selected by default. ...
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 ...
Ubuntu Trusty Tahr is going to be released on April 17th 2014. Meera Tamil font, a free licensed unicode font for Tamil will be available in this release. The font is already available in Debian. In both Ubuntu and Debian you can install the font by sudo apt-get install fonts-meera-taml Thanks Vasudev for packaging it for Debian.
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. ...
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. Unlike EOT, WOFF, TTF formats , SVG is plain text uncompressed file. ...
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.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/saz and Mediawiki localization started in translatewiki Since the language did not have any proper fonts or input tools, this was not going well. ...