Initial look at Malayalam
The Malayalam script began to develop from a script known as vattezhuthu (round writing), a descendant of the Brahmi script.
- http://www.omniglot.com/writing/malayalam.htm
The script reads left to right so its not too much of a headfuck, and there are two forms: The traditional (complex) script used for hundreds of years up to the 1970s, and a simplified script (more like roman) without the complex vowel placement, which was developed for typewriters.
The “round writing” quality, these big nice curves, really lend themselves to Spiros, I think. Playing with drawing an ml glyph revealed some funny behaviour in FF Spiros:
New points could only be added to the spline behind the ‘first point.’ I haven’t checked out the latest CVS though, so this might be fixed with the new libspiro.
Anyway, this post is about Malayalam, not Spiro. I can render the Malayalam wikipedia out of the box on Gobuntu, thanks to the Debian package ttf-malayalam-fonts which contains two fonts, and the Debian copyright file has some interesting links.
I’ve been on the Indian Free Software Foundation Friends mailing list for about 9 months, since the community there keep a good track of important free software speeches being posted online, and is behind the recent GNU/Hurd installation CD-ROM that I tried a couple of months back.
So I downloaded the entire archive with a bit of wget+bash foo, and used Thunderbird to browse the posts containing “font.”
This turned up some interesting things, including the recently released Meera GPL font that isn’t in the Debian package yet.
Cross searching the posts turned up the FSF-Kerala mailing list which I also downloaded and picked through in the same way, revealing the Meera homepage at http://suruma.sarovar.org/
These lists are are nice resource for things like the exact dates that Malayalam became supported by free software design tools:
Subject: [Fsf-kerala] Scribus in Malayalam From: vsasi@hotpop.com (V. Sasi Kumar) Date: Thu Feb 24 12:12:53 2005 Scribus 1.3, now available in cvs, supports complex Indian and other languages including Malayalam. Please see: http://www.scribus.org.uk/gallery/13/ This solves the problem of a long-felt gap in Malayalam support in GNU/Linux — that of a good dtp application. — V. Sasi Kumar vsasi@hotpop.com
There was tonnes of other such trivia buried in there, that I don’t need to quote on here.
So I’ve emailed the flickr user who posted Meera screenshots and some printed articles in Malayalam about software freedom, Anivar Aravind:
Hi, I’m a student at The University of Reading, UK, on the Masters degree in Typeface Design - http://www.typedesign.rdg.ac.uk/ - and am working on free software fonts. A significant part of the course is developing our typeface into a family with a complex script complement, and full OpenType features. I am considering designing an original Malayalam typeface designed for reading long passages of text on screen, that will be wholly created with and released as free software. I found your images of software-freedom related text in the script, and screen shots of the recently released Meera OpenType font in use with gedit, so I thought I’d drop you a line to ask if you’d like to be involved in my project as someone to give me feedback :-) Do you know how many Malayalam free software fonts already exist? I see http://packages.debian.org/sid/ttf-malayalam-fonts but I wonder if others are out there - and are really free software, not just freeware. — Regards, Dave
And I sent a similar email to the addresses I found in the FSF-Kerala archives from the author of Meera, but sadly it bounced. But Anivar Aravind’s homepage linked to his blog at http://surumablog.blogspot.com/ so I made a comment to a post there to try and contact him.
Sadly for me, the blog isn’t much in English, but Anivar’s blog is, and has a nice summary of all the recent (and very recent!) progress with supporting Malayalam in GNU/Linux.
Anivar also linked to his friend, Hiran Venugopalan, who I was impressed by, since he’s also giving presentations (PDF) on the free software ethic, and some awesome photos of the 4th GPLv3 conference. I emailed him too :-)
The local user group these guys are involved in is pretty much the opposite of my local user group. Which reminds me, I’ve not kept up my efforts to make connections with the Computer Science department at Reading University.
Nor have I kept up my efforts to draw a lot. That’s the challenge for this weekend.
I think I’ll do a few versions of the Departmentally approved sketch-word “adhesion” and also Malayalam Numerals:
The Initial look at Malayalam by David Crossland, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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3 Responses to “Initial look at Malayalam”
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Happy to see Your post about Malayalam Computing. I got your mail from Flickr. We are volounteer group called swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC). Please ask your questions on SMC Mailing List http://groups.google.com/group/smc-discuss
Project Homepage is on savannah http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc
Hello.
As a graphic designer with a great love for typography and a Malayalam-speaker, it’s really good to know of your work on a new family of typefaces for the language.
I’d love to view some of the actual designs for your Malayalam font, is it early days still for that? Do you have a mailing list that I could join?
Regards, Arun
Hi Arun!
I’ll post samples of my Malayalam font on my blog, rather than a mailing list, and be assured that setting up some collaborative type design infrastructure is part of my plan :-)
Thanks for getting in touch and I’ll be sure to drop you a line when I post something too :-)