Manjari

Manjari is a traditional orthography font for Malayalam. It has large set of ligatures, vowel signs like /u/ get attached to its corresponding consonants to form ligatures. But, sometimes there are requirements to illustrate new orthography Malayalam content in Manjari. Recently, Manjari was used to typeset an academic book related to Malayalam script and it was required to show some content in new orthography with detached vowel signs and detached reph signs. Using a different font that follows new orthography such as Noto Sans Malayalam was possible, but mixing Noto and Manjari won’t give a pleasant reading experience. ...

A new version of Manjari Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 2.000 comes with a few bugfixes and glyph additions. Most of the changes are based on a review by Google fonts team. New version is available at SMC website for preview and download. Changes Design correction for Malayalam number 10 to better match the attestations (0d6b0fc2) Avoid glyphs that use components that are components themself (6fe9b35d) Add ligatures glyphs for ൻ + ് + റ version of nta (2c39ae08) Review and update diacritics alignment (c498245d) Rename License.txt to OFL.txt (a483e86c and 40411ef0) Revert “Use consistant hhea ascender and descender” and disable vertical metrics check in fontbakery (832e54e3 and 05a899d1) GDEF: Change the Mark glyphs to non-spacing and add more mark glyphs (550d0515) Improve fractions glyphs for consistant stroke widths (b6e70bb5) Fix points out of bounds issues (285417c6) Add ക്ട്ര ligature glyph (186fdb4b) Add more tests for kerning and latin (9d900e58) CI: Exclude name check in fontbakery (c28d095f) Multiple build toolchain updates The latest version is not yet available at Google fonts. But I hope it will be updated soon. ...

Santhosh and I jointly presented a paper at Typoday 2018. The paper was titled ‘Spiral splines in typeface design: A case study of Manjari Malayalam typeface’. The full paper is available here. The presentation is available here. Typoday is the annual conference where typographers and graphic designers from academia and industry come up with their ideas and showcase their work. Typoday 2018 was held at Convocation Hall, University of Mumbai. ...

A new version of Manjari typeface is available now. Version 1.5 is mainly a bug fix release. In version 1.3, the build tooling of the project was changed from fontforge to fontmake. Two weeks back a few people reported that the font no longer works in MS Word and Wordpad. Font selector lists the font, but when selected, the content remains same. It works in all other applications without any issues. Because of that the bug went unnoticed. ...

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. ...

Eureka childrens science magazine now prints in Manjari font I designed. Happiness is seeing your favorite childhood magazine in your font!