Inkscape

The ligatures for the Malayalam conjuncts ച്ച, ള്ള have less popular variants as shown below The second form is not seen in print but often in handwritten Malayalam. I have seen it a lot in bus boards especially at Thiruvananthapuram. There are no digital typefaces with the second style, except the Chilanka font I designed. It uses the second variant of ച്ച. I got lot of appreciation for that style variant, but also recieved request for the first form of ച്ച. I had a private copy of Chilanka with that variant and had given to whoever requested. I also recieved some requests for the second style of ള്ള. For the Manjari font too, I recieved requests for second variant. ...

One year back I wrote about how to use Inkscape as a workaround solution for DTP in indic scripts. Still we don’t have any DTP software which supports Indic scripts in Unicode. Scribus still does not have the Indic support. One issue with inkscape when used as DTP for indic script was, a few indic scripts always wanted hyphenation when text is justified. For example Malayalam has lengthy words and often space is wasted in lines if the text is not automatically hyphenated. But this feature was not available in inkscape. There is a wishlist bug for adding this feature to Inkscape. I tried to develop an extension for Inkscape to achieve this. ...

A good page layout package for GNU/Linux with Indic language and unicode support is one of the missing item in the list of software packages for Indic computing. Scribus gives hope but it is still not ready to serve the purpose. So what could be the solution? Should we wait or find out ‘workarounds’? No, There is a solution. Till scribus is ready with indic support Inkscape will help us. Inkscape is not a DTP software, but it can do it if required. Using its text objects and other text/image editing features we can design pages in Unicode itself. And with Pango rendering. ...