W3C Workshop at Madrid
Posted on May 3, 2014
| Santhosh Thottingal
I will be speaking at the upcoming W3C workshop at Madrid. The workshop is on 7-8 May 2014 and the theme is “New Horizons for the Multilingual Web”.
I will be co-presenting with Pau Giner, David Chan from Wikimedia Foundation Language engineering team on best practices of translation at wikipedia. It will cover the design (from both technical and user experience perspectives) of the translation tools, and their expected impact on Wikipedia and the Web as a whole.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Malayalam Wikisource Offline version
Posted on June 11, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
Malayalam Wikisource community today released the first offline version of Malayalam wikisource during the 4th annual wiki meetup of Malayalam wikimedians. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a wikisource project release its offline version. Malayalam wiki community had released the first version of Malayalam wikipedia one year back.
Releasing the offline version of a wikisource is a challenging project. The technical aspects of the project was designed and implemented by myself.
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Mediawiki Berlin hackathon
Posted on May 17, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
I am just back from Mediawiki Berlin Hackathon. On May 13 to 15, Mediawiki developers attended the hackathon and squashed many bugs and discussed many features. Members of language committee had its first real-life meeting in parallel with hackathon. It was a nice event, learned a lot, talked to many awesome hackers and linguists.
Milos Rancic has written a summary of the discussions happened during language committee meeting here : http://lists.
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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.
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Cross Language Approximate Search on Indic Languages- A demo
Posted on April 3, 2011
| Santhosh Thottingal
A demo of cross language approximate search in Indic text:
The Malayalam word സാമ്പാര് is compared against a paragraph from http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambar.
In the bottom half, words marked in yellow color are search results.
You can see that a Kannada word ಸಾಂಬಾರ್ is matched for Malayalam word. And that is why this is called cross-language.
The inflections of the words സാമ്പാര് – സാമ്പാറും, സാമ്പാറു etc are also found as results.
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Wikimania 2010, Poland
Posted on July 17, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
I left Chennai on Wednesday(8th) and reached Frankfurt airport on Thursday morning. Rest of the people from India for wikimania- Shiju Alex, Tinu Cherian, Srinivas Gunta, Arjun Rao were already reached the airport and I joined them. We reached Gdansk Airport by 12.30 PM. Our accommodation was at a students hostel of Gdansk University. Language was a big issue since most of the people does not understand English and only know Polish Language.
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Attending Wikimania 2010
Posted on July 6, 2010
| Santhosh Thottingal
I will be attending Wikimania 2010, Gdansk, Poland. This annual international conference of the Wikimedia community is from July 9 to July 11.
I will be presenting wik2cd, the tool I wrote for Malayalam wikipedia version 1.0 there in a joint workshop with wikipedia offline developers. I will be joining with Manuel Schneider, Shiju Alex, Martin Walker in the workshop titled: Creating offline version of Wiki content – Solutions and Challenges.
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