Introducing Nupuram, new Malayalam typeface
Posted on October 5, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
I am happy to introduce Nupuram, a new Malayalam typeface that I have been designing and developing for several months. The typeface is not ready for a stable release, but pre-release versions are available for early testing.
Nupuram is a superfamily typeface. Nupuram variable font Taking full advantage of variable font technology, Nupuram offers an unprecedented level of flexibility, all from a single font file. Nupuram has 4 variation axes: Weight, Width, Slant and Softness.
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Gayathri 1.20 released
Posted on May 14, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
A new version of Gayathri typeface is available now. Version 1.20 comes with a few bugfixes and glyph additions.
New version is available at SMC website for preview and download.
Changes Fix the size issue of fullstop and comma Add 0D7B+0D4D+0D31 based ന്റ Improve kerning for latin Add 22 latin glyphs Fix spacing issues for quote signs Flatten the nested components Update build dependencies and CI The latest version is not yet available at Google fonts.
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ലിപിപരിഷ്കരണം 2022
Posted on April 23, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
മലയാളലിപി പരിഷ്കരിക്കാനായി സർക്കാർ രൂപീകരിച്ച വിദഗ്ദ്ധസമിതിയുടെ നിർദ്ദേശങ്ങൾ അംഗീകരിച്ചെന്നും ഉ ചിഹ്നങ്ങൾ മാത്രം വിട്ടെഴുതുന്ന പഴയലിപി സമിതി നിർദ്ദേശിച്ചുവെന്നുമുള്ള വാർത്തകളുടെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തിൽ ചില പ്രതികരണങ്ങളും ചിന്തകളും പങ്കുവെയ്ക്കുന്നു.
ഫോണ്ടുകളും ലിപിപരിഷ്കരണവും നിലവിൽ പേന/ബ്രഷ് കൊണ്ടല്ലാത്ത എല്ലാത്തരം അച്ചടിയും അക്ഷരങ്ങളുടെ ചിത്രീകരണവും നടക്കുന്നത് ഫോണ്ടുകൾ എന്ന സോഫ്റ്റ്വെയർ വഴിയാണ്. അതുകൊണ്ടുതന്നെ ഒരു ഭാഷയിലെ ലിപിരൂപങ്ങളെക്കുറിച്ചുള്ള ഏതൊരുമാറ്റത്തിനും ഇന്ന് ഒരു സോഫ്റ്റ്വെയർ റിലീസ് സൈക്കിളിനോട് സാമ്യമുണ്ട്. പക്ഷേ പൂർണ്ണാർത്ഥത്തിൽ ഒരു സോഫ്റ്റ്വെയർ അതിന്റെ ഫീച്ചറുകളിൽ മാറ്റം വരുത്തി പുതിയ പതിപ്പായി ഇറക്കുന്നപോലെയല്ല ഫോണ്ടുകളുടെ റിലീസ്. ഫോണ്ടുകളിൽ ടെക്നോളജിയുടെ ഒപ്പം തന്നെ അക്ഷരങ്ങളുടെ കലാപരമായ ചിത്രീകരണം കൂടി ഉള്ളതുകൊണ്ട് ഒരിക്കൽ ഒരു ഫോണ്ട് പുറത്തുവന്നാൽ അതിന്റെ രൂപകല്പനയും ഘടനയും മാറ്റിപ്പണിത് പുറത്തിറക്കാറില്ല.
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ബഹുവചനമില്ലാത്ത ദേശാഭിമാനി
Posted on February 21, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
Hyphenation of Indian languages
Posted on February 18, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
The latest version of Firefox - Firefox 97 - supports hyphenation of Indian languages. I had filed a bug report to include the hyphenation patterns I prepared in Firefox. That 6 year old bug report is now resolved.
Hyphenation is the process inserting hyphens in between the syllables of a word so that when the text is justified, maximum space is utilized.
Following languages are supported:
Assamese Bengali Gujarati Hindi Kannada Malayalam Marati Odia Panjabi Tamil Telugu I had written several articles about how to do hyphenation for Indian languages in various applications.
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Using Manjari as new orthography Malayalam font
Posted on October 29, 2021
| Santhosh Thottingal
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.
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One million Wikipedia articles by translation
Posted on October 22, 2021
| Santhosh Thottingal
I am happy to share a news from my work at Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikipedia article translation system, known as Content Translation reached a milestone of creating one million articles. Since 2015, this is my major project at WMF and I am lead engineer for the project. The Content Translation system helps Wikipedia editors to quickly translate and publish articles from one language wiki to another. This way, the knowledge gap between different languages are reduced.
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New version of Malayalam morphology analyser
Posted on March 20, 2021
| Santhosh Thottingal
In the previous blog post I explained my efforts to modernize SFST. Since I published SFST python binding and modernized to make it compile in all operating systems, next step was to drop HFST dependency of mlmorph and use the new version of SFST 1.5.0.
mlmorph 1.3.0 has no dependency on HFST and all installation problems in different operating systems and python versions are solved now.
Latest version is also available in pypi.
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New version of Stuttgart Finite State Transducer
Posted on March 20, 2021
| Santhosh Thottingal
The Malayalam morphology analyser(mlmorph) I am actively developing since 2016 is based on Stuttgart Finite State Transducer(SFST) formalism. SFST was developed by Dr Helmut Schmid. Since SFST had minimal developer apis and no functional python APIs, I was using Helsinki Finite State Transducer(HFST) toolkit. HFST has python binding and better tooling and development support. HFST has SFST backend so there was no issue in using SFST formalism.
But HFST development has slowed down in past years.
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New version of Manjari Typeface released
Posted on March 19, 2021
| Santhosh Thottingal
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.
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