The Way We Proceed With Malayalam ..

Well, with the successful releases for Lohit Gujarati & Lohit Devanagari, we have planned to move towards Malayalam . Since the news has been already announced regarding the development plan for Malayalam language, this post is specifically about the minute details that we had considered while starting & developing towards the way.

As we have achieved the basic goals for both Lohit Gujarati & Lohit-Devangari, which were set at the start of project,now we had set the improvement plan for malyalam as well, which involves the following things :

• Following AGL. [1]
• Supporting points provided in Unicode chapter 9 for Malayalam script.
• Feature file separate for flexibility and reusability.
• Complete cleanup of existing Open type tables
• Supporting both "mlym" and "mlm2" open type specifications.
• Thorough testing with Harfbuzz and Uniscribe (WinXp, W7 and W8).  

Present status of Project : 

Inspite of this basic goals ,I would like to depict the exact steps that we followed .

>>  The first task that we have started with Malayalam is to create test-file. This file is specifically for glyph-testing purpose & proper contextualization of glyph as well .
 
>>  The next thing We have moved to, is GSUB Cleanup so that we can start Malayalam development from very initial step while keeping an eye towards the basic moto.
 
>>  The Third task we have completed is about Glyph renaming. This step really helps for writing the GSUB rules, text rendering & glyph positioning sequence as well.
                 For this task i would like to elaborate, as we had previously discussed & concluded , its better to follow AGL. yet fontforge restricts us for lengthy glyph namings , for such glyphs , we had excluded the AGL specification rules.

>>  After the Glyph-renaming task, We had gone through Malayalam Typography specification, & started For OT rule writing task. Presently We are done with basic shaping forms (except for cjct feature)[2].

Upcoming Schedule :

•  To finish up with the remaining Features in regards to OT rule writing. 
•  Testing Activity

  you can have the updated project status & activities on Github [3] .so this the agenda that we had planned & following , thereby raising a step towards making the font more efficient, less redundant, & stable. Thanks.

1. https://sourceforge.net/adobe/aglfn/wiki/AGL%20Specification/
2. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/malayalam/intro.htm#features
3. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/tree/master/malayalam

Lohit Devanagari 2.93.0 release (lohit2 project)

After Lohit-Devangari 2.92.0 release, we are here with its next release. Thanks to all who gave feedback for our release. This release mainly focused for the fixes which makes Lohit more stable and usable.

 Fixes : 

• Additions of 17 glyphs for U+093F (ि) and its variants (reph, anusvara).
• Contextual chaining substitution to match additionally included matras
• Fix for locl tables for Marathi and Nepali language.
• Fix for self-intersecting glyph warning in number of shapes.
• Testing across platform.

The rest of the minor fixes regarding the glyph contextualization, conjunct formation, ligature formation etc which were reported on github ,had efficiently resolved now . You can have a look over there [1].

 With this release , the updated lohit project page [2] is available for download.
 Installation tar ball link for Lohit is available at [3]. Your feedback is key asset for us so feel free to ask anything related Lohit-Devanagari issues [4]. 

1. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues?state=open
2. https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/
3. https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/o/lohit/lohit-devanagari-2.93.0.tar.gz
4. https://github.com/snehakore
 

Lohit Gujarati Beta Release

Hello all ... :) First of all, I wanted to thank all of the people who were actively involved in Lohit-gujarati testing. We had good response for the same .

Since its the time for beta release, i would like to mention the changes we dealt with. as far as Lohit-Gujarati alpha release was concerned, yet many changes were there that has to be resolved. For an example , we may consider the thing about matching the ivowel Matras with the character. Previously Lohit was working with the matras that was working properly with some of the glyphs. but for the others, Lohit needs to have inclusion of additional matras . So, in present release , we had particularly taken care for that. The next change is about the proper glyph contextualization for the conjuncts. The exact issues & changes can be viewed on GitHub [1].

To be more specific , The screenshots plays an important role for better understanding of the recent changes that were reflected (i.e changes regarding matras , conjucts contextualization etc).

 The screenshots on Linux platform with Notepad Application :

Before committing the changes :                  With Updated Font :     

 

 

All the images which are aligned to left are "before committing the changes", & those which are aligned to right are with "updated font".

Apart from this, We had tested the updated Lohit-Gujarati on  W8,  Win xp & W7 as well. The screenshot for the Glyph matras properly working on W8 platform :
The screenshot depicts the glyph rendering comparison with font shruti & Lohit-Gujarati .

So Gujarati is now updated with proper glyph rendering. yet any issues are there,  that you come across, just create new issue at [2], those are surely answered on GitHub . You can have the Lohit-Gujarati fontfile from [3].

1. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues?page=1&state=closed
2. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/new
3. https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/o/lohit/lohit-gujarati-ttf-2.92.0.tar.gz