It comes with a regular variant, embellished with stylistic alternates for a number of characters. The default shape of characters D, O,ഠ, ാ etc. are wider in stark contrast with the shape of other characters designed as narrow width. The font contains alternate shapes for these characters more in line with the general narrow width characteristic.
Users can enable the stylistic alternates in typesetting systems, should they wish.
XeTeX: stylistic variant can be enabled with the StylisticSet={1} option when defining the font via fontspec package. For e.g.
% in the preamble \newfontfamily\chingam[Ligatures=TeX,Script=Malayalam,StylisticSet={1}]{Chingam} … \begin{document} \chingam{മനുഷ്യരെല്ലാവരും തുല്യാവകാശങ്ങളോടും അന്തസ്സോടും സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യത്തോടുംകൂടി ജനിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളവരാണ്…} \end{document}
Scribus: extra font features are accessible since version 1.6
LibreOffice: extra font features are accessible since version 7.4. Enable it using Format→Character→Language→Features.
InDesign: very similar to Scribus; there should be an option in the text/font properties to choose the stylistic set.
Development
Chingam is designed and drawn by Narayana Bhattathiri. Based on the initial drawings on paper, the glyph shapes are created in vector format (svg) following the glyph naming convention used in RIT projects. A new build script is developed by Rajeesh that makes it easier for designers to iterate & adjust the font metadata & metrics. Review & scrutiny done by CVR, Hussain KH and Ashok Kumar improved the font substantially.
Download
Chingam is licensed under Open Font License. The font can be downloaded from Rachana website, sources are available in GitLab page.
I have installed GNU/Linux on many a computers in ~20 years (some automated, most individually). In the University, I used to be woken past midnight by someone knocking at the door — who reinstalled Windows — and now they can’t boot because grub was overwritten. I’d rub the eyes, pickup the bunch latest Fedora CDs and go rescue the beast machine. Linux installation, customization and grub-recovery was my specialization (no, the course didn’t have credit for that).
Technologies (libre & otherwise) have improved since then. Instead of MBR, there’s GPT (no, not that one). Instead of BIOS, there’s UEFI. Dual booting Windows with GNU/Linux has become mostly painless. Then there’s Secure Boot. Libre software works with that too. You may still run into issues; I ran into one recently and if someone is in the same position I hope this helps:
A friend of mine got an Ideapad 3 Gaming laptop (which was preinstalled with Windows 11) and we tried to install Fedora 37 on it (of course, remotely; thanks to screensharing and cameras on mobile phones). The bootable USB pendrive was not being listed in boot options (F12), so we fiddled with TPM & Secure Boot settings in EFI settings (F2). No luck, and troubleshooting eventually concluded that the USB pendrive was faulty. Tried with another one, and this time it was detected, happily installed Fedora 37 (under 15 mins, because instead of spinning Hard Disks, there’s SSD). Fedora boots & works fine.
A day later, the friend selects Windows to boot into (from grub menu) and gets greeted by a BitLocker message: “Enter bitlocker recovery key” because “Secure boot is disabled”.
Dang. I thought we re-enabled Secure Boot, but apparently not. Go to EFI settings, and turn it back on; save & reboot; select Windows — but BitLocker kept asking for recovery key but with a different reason: “Secure Boot policy has unexpectedly changed”.
That led to scrambling & searching, as BitLocker was not enabled by the user but OEM, and thus there was no recovery key in the user’s Microsoft online account (if the user had enabled it manually, they can find the key there).
The nature of the error message made me conclude that Fedora installation with secure boot disabled has somehow altered the TPM settings and Windows (rightfully) refuses to boot. EFI settings has an option to ‘Restore Factory Keys’ which will reset the secure boot DB. I could try that to remove Fedora keys, pray Windows boots and if it works, recover grub (my specialty) or reinstall Fedora in the worst case scenario.
Enter Matthew Garret. Matthew was instrumental in making GNU/Linux systems to work with Secure Boot (and was awarded the prestigious Free Software Foundation Award). He is a security researcher who frequently writes about computer security.
I have sought Matthew’s advice before trying anything stupid, and he suggested thus (reproduced with permission):
First, how are you attempting to boot Windows? If you’re doing this via grub then this will result in the secure boot measurements changing and this error occurring – if you pick Windows from the firmware boot menu (which I think should appear if you hit F12 on an Ideapad?) then this might solve the problem.
If neither of these approaches work, then please try resetting the factory keys, reset the firmware to its default settings, and delete any Fedora boot entries from the firmware (you can recover them later), and with luck that’ll work.
Thankfully, the first option of booting Windows directly via F12 — without involving grub — works. And the first thing the user does after logging in is back up the recovery keys.
The Malayalam serif font RIT Rachana and its sans-serif counterpart MeeraNew have enjoyed a wide array of improvements in the past months; and are available now for download and use.
Some notable improvements are listed here:
Entire Malayalam character set defined in Unicode 15, including archaic and vedic characters.
All characters — especially vowel signs — now belong to proper Unicode categoryGDEF class (thanks to Liang Hai for pointing out the correction), removing a workaround put in place just for Adobe InDesign. This workaround is not required when using HarfBuzz shaping engine (which you should anyway).
Improved design of old-style figures 0, 1 & 2 in RIT-Rachana.
Standalone dependent glyphs of pre-base ra (reph) and below-base la can be displayed with ‘zwj+് + ര/ല’ respectively, useful for informational purpose (when writing a typography specific article, for instance). These characters otherwise always conjoin with the base character.
Major improvements in shaping rules to adhere to language rules even better: double consonants are always joined properly in context; even for unusual combinations. Correct shaping for below instance can be obtained by adding a ZWNJ before ണ but the advanced shaping rule is smarter to not require encoding corrections.
Improved underline position (although thou shalt question thyself why use underline in Indic scripts), which is now also respected by LibreOffice 7.5 thanks to Khaled Hosny. This bug was reported many years ago.
ന് + ് + റ → ന്റ (Unicode 5.1 atomic chillu nta) support added upon request.
… kerning improvements and many more tweaks and fine tuning. As usual, both typefaces are free & open source software, available at Rachana website. They will be available shortly in Fedora 36 & 37 as an update.