Digging deeper into Malayalam Fonts

Cibu C J emailed me on Friday, and he works at the Googleplex in i18n and helped Pango this year too, so that was awesome. He wrote,

I am sending this mail after seeing your comment

List of known fonts are here [on a wikia wiki]

I am interested to hear your thoughts in detail..

and I replied quickly and said I’d post in detail on my blog. And here we are.

There fonts listed on the wiki are:

MalOtf

MalOtf is perhaps the most interesting, because my university course requirements are that I produce a featured OpenType font like this one apparently is, and I am very interested in MetaFont and the homepage says it has come from Metafont sources. Browsing the project website, the files are all uploaded in 2002, and there are FontForge SFD sourcecode files which is great.

GPLv2+ is also great to see, although lacking the Font Exception is a shame. I hope to contact the copyright holders to change that. I guess that starts with Jeroen Hellingman. I found his email easily, and in a Wikipedia chatpage I read that he runs Project Gutenberg of the Philippines which is awesome to see.

The Metafont sources seemed to be lacking though. Back to searching, in CTAN I found a proper MetaFont for the Oriya script by Jeroen, which is also totally awesome :-) The documentation (tex source

How the Oriya fonts were made

To the typeface designer, Oriya script poses a big challenge: to create a font that, while it maintains the characteristic Oriyan appearance, is still easily readable and also economises the use of paper. To achieve this, the first most important issue is to find the proper proportion between the size of the circle and the size of the inner, distinctive features of each letter. Especially when drawing the letters in large size on a sheet of paper, one tends to make the circle far to large, and, when the design is reduced to the normal size of a letter the inner details have become so small as hardly visible. However, the larger one makes the inner part, the more difficult it becomes to draw a pleasing circle around it.

A second consideration is the extend to which vowel signs and secondary characters are allowed to stick below or above the letters, as this defines the necessary baseline distance, and also the texture of the printed page. Here, again, one should not be tempted to make the vowel signs and secondary characters to small, and one can often win much by using a ligature instead of the standard combination—-although the number of ligatures that can be used is limited.

Because Oriya used to be written on palm-leaves, Oriya has little or no calligraphic tradition. One cannot produce thick-thin transitions, and other niceties with a metal nib. With the introduction of the printing press in India\footnote{*}{The first printing in Oriya was probably done at the Serampore mission press in the early nineteenth century. In 1809 this press printed a complete bible in Oriya.—-B.S. Kesavan, {\it History of Printing and Publishing in India,} Vol.~I, p.~254}, Oriya typefaces with thick-thin transistions were produced. However, these thick-thin transitions where not applied in a consistent way.

In this design, an attempt was made to add some calligraphic effects to the letters. After some trial and error, a 30~degree cut nib was found out to produce very acceptable results in most letters. Only in a few letters some little tricks, like using a second, much thinner pen, where required to make the result pleasing—-notably in the diagonals of {\or y} {\it .ya}, {\or S} {\it \d{s}a}, and {\or x} {\it k\d{s}a}.

When I started the design of this font, I decided to look at some old Oriya manuscripts first—-which was easy, as the museum was just around the corner from my home in Ahmedabad—-and started to make skeleton studies. I sketched the skeleton or `essence’ of the letter 25 millimetres high on graph paper.

After this, I could easily read of the coordinates of the control points which I then coded in Metafont. Now, by giving the pen somewhat more `body,’ a more usable letter would appear. Then, by changing the pen from a circle to a slanted ellipse, a more calligraphic appearance was achieved. The illustration below demonstrates this for the letter {\or k} {\it ka\/}:

(All the illustrations are visible in the postscript version)

From there I found the Malayalam script collection on CTAN which is maintained by Alex A.J. and contains three Type1 fonts, apparently made with FontForge, although the PDF documentation mentions that they are MetaFonts, so perhaps FontForge was just used to compile Type1 format fonts. I’ve emailed Alex about this, and he got back to me, and will soon send the Metafont sources. Awesome.

The project website has an image of a Malayalam keyboard layout:

And a zip file with a nice collection of HTML test files.

N.V Shaji did the TrueType version, but he hasn’t yet replied to my emails.

Baiju M did the OpenType tables, and seems to be a great Python and Zope programmer :-) I found his initial annoucement of the font:

Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2002 09:21:18 +0400 (SCT)
From: Baiju M 
To: gsinai@yudit.org
Subject: Malayalam OpenType font (GPL'ed)

Hi,
   I have a GPL'ed Malayalam OpenType font. Its originally created by
Jeroen Hellingman  using Metafont, then N.V Shaji
 converted into TrueType by using PfaEdit, now I
added some GSUB tables. Could you please add this into your download
section. Recently a private company has released 35 indian language
fonts nder GPL, I started converting 4 Malayalam fonts into OTF, will
send you after completing.

The font is Unicode based, name : MalOtf.ttf

http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/smc/free-mal-fonts.pkg/1.0/free-mal-fonts.tar.gz

I have attached this font.

Regards,
Baiju M

The SMC mailing list moved to GoogleGroups in 2005, and to Wikia more recently too. Older information is on GNU Savannah, including a members list. The initial project activity seems to be in 2002, like the above email and this HOWTO (which seems sadly not to have been updated, although there is interest in making a new one) but today there is plenty of traffic on the new GoogleGroup list, and even a #smc-project IRC channel on freenode with logs on the web (reminding me of the glory days… :-)

The current website is the Wikia wiki, with interesting pages like the Google Summer of Code page that is a bit more informative than the official Google SoC page.

(Its awesome to see a face I recognize (Behdad) on the front row, really brings home the “community” aspect of GNU/Linux development :-)

One of the SoC projects was an “Open Type font with Swathanthra Malayalam Computing Design Specifications” and this got funded, I think. And the Software Freedom Day page looks really great :-)

An excellent English review of the day by Pramode explained the context of the SMC group that I was just figuring out above:

One of the objectives of the meeting was to take stock of the activities going on as part of the `Swathanthra Malayalam Computing’ effort for the past one year. SMC was started by Baiju M when he was a student at REC Calicut. The project was dormant for a long time until it was woken up by Praveen and friends. A major push came in the form of the project being selected for the Google Summer of Code (I believe it is the only Indian project participating in SoC). A total of seven or eight projects coming under the SMC umbrella had their formal `release’ today.

The Malayalam Unicode font, designed by Hussain and Suresh, was released at the function.

…

There are people who doubt the logic behind creating a computing environment with support for a language like Malayalam. After all, almost all of us can read and understand basic English, so what’s the point in putting in so much of effort? The answer is to look from a much wider angle. As one of the speakers pointed out, a language has to continuously evolve if it is to be alive. A language like Sanskrit is virtually dead - few people use it. A society and a culture is identified by its language - once the language is dead, the society starts losing its identity. A good way to keep a language alive is to take it to the digital world - the world of the PC/Communication devices and the Internet. This is one context in which developing regional language computing environments and popularising them has great significance.

And it seems Pramode is an OpenMoko user too - which is excellent, as I was hoping to use a Neo1979 as a testing scenario. He also replied to my email over the weekend, and suggested I contact Praveen. Praveen wrote an article about the freedom problems with Ubuntu which I have total agreement with.

One blogger posted a rave review about the SMC’s tools and mentioned a Malayalam GLMatrix screensaver patch which is fun :-) (and today on #smc-project this HOWTO was mentioned)

While searching around, I also found the http://www.indlinux.org/ general GNU/Linux Indic localisation project website (that also has a mailing list) and the Ubuntu specific one. This pointed at some other irc channels in addition to #smc-project: #ubuntu-in, #gnu-india, #linux-india

Lohit

Red Hat has commissioned 11 Indic fonts, in the Lohit Project, and the ReadMe reported these are all done with FontForge - awesome! - and turned up another mailing list to canvass. (There is also a fedora-india list)

Meera

The Suruma Project spans the Meera font and patchs to Pango and QT text layout. The Meera download has a readme:

Meera Font
^^^^^^^^^^
The Meera opentype font, a Malayalam traditional script font, is primarily created for the GNU system.The inspiration for this work is drawn from the pioneering works done by Rachana Aksharavedi.The font is a result of collaborative effort from:

1. Mr.Hussain K H (The designer of popular Rachana fonts for Rachana Aksharavedi and an ardent supporter of traditional Malayalam orthography)

2. Suresh P ( A free software enthusiast and hobbyist)

3. Swathantra Malayalam Computing (A free software collective engaged in development, localization and popularization  of various free software for Malayalam)

Main features of the font
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
1. Traditional script is used.
2. Even stroke typeface for better screen rendering.
3. Proper Ascent/Descent metrics considering the nature of vertically stacked Malayalam conjuncts.
4. Individually designed  glyphs  for complex conjuncts rather than using component glyphs.
5. Glyphs for conjuncts with gopi-repham already designed for future use.

To do
^^^^^^
1. Solve kerning issues.
2. Implement gopi-repham in GSUB.
3. Add support for silgraphite.

The “Hussain K H - Suresh P” connection reminds me of the Knuth-Zaph one :-)

And the Meera changelog revealed an update only a few weeks ago, and Suresh’s new email address.

AnjaliOldLipi

There are a lot of technical problems with this font. It is “public domain” too, which is worrying.

There are other fonts on the SMC wikia to investigate another time…. :-)

The Digging deeper into Malayalam Fonts by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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