smc-fonts (Meera) updated

Meera is the default font for Malayalam in Fedora. Lately, a few bugs causing wrong rendering of some complex conjuncts were identified and reported – 1, 2.  There was another bug reported in RedHat bugzilla. As Unicode 5.1 is not supported by smc-fonts, glyph Ⓡ was being displayed for Atomic Chillu letters. To make the font Unicode complying, it was suggested to remove this.

Yesterday a new release of Meera fixing all these bugs was made available by Suresh, and I’ve uploaded a new upstream source file at Savannah repository. Then the RPMs were rebuilt for rawhide, which can be found here.

And the ChangeLog reads:

* The glyphs(an R inside a circle) at unallocated Unicode code points are removed.
* Wrong glyph for 'th1s1r3u1' (ത്സ്രു) fixed.
* Breaking up of conjunct 'l3k1k1' (ല്ക്ക) fixed.
* Shaping issues for 'r3cil'+'l3l3' (ര്‍ല്ല) context fixed.

Thanks to Suresh, Ani Peter, Santhosh Thottingal and Pravin Satpute !

Kuttans – another frontend for Payyans

Few months ago I released Chathans, a frontend to the Payyans ASCII <=> Unicode converter. Few weeks later, Santhosh forwarded a mail from Rahul with another neat implementation of a frontend completely written in Qt4. He named it Kuttans as a pun on Qt+Payyans.

I liked the User Interface at the first look. But it was using “system()” call to interact with Payyans. So we decided to reimplement it in PyQt4. Based on the UI designed in Qt Creator, the python ui class is generated with pyuic4; and the resources (icons…) with pyrcc4 (both from the PyQt4-devel) package.

Features include:

• Support for Creating, Displaying, Editing and Saving ASCII/Unicode files
• Support for all available fonts. Useful in determining the ASCII font if the font is not known for original ASCII document
• All the standard Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo/Redo functionalities

RPM package and source tar ball can be obtained from Savannah repository. Source can be browsed in Savannah git repo.

Future improvements:

• Support for displaying PDF files (using python bindings for poppler-qt4)
• .deb package for Debian/Ubuntu

ImageMagick and Unicode

echo "രജീഷ്" |‌ convert -pointsize 48 label:@- image.png gives me nothing but a series of ‘?’ marks of 48 points in the output image.

And convert -font Arial label:'Something' something.png gives me error “convert: unable to read font `Arial'.” instead of a nice image with ‘Something’ in Arial font.

So, what’s the solution? List the fonts available. No, fc-list doesn’t help. You need to use the exact name in the output list of  convert -list font to work. There I see Rachana font listed as Rachana-Regular.

And then,

convert -font Rachana-Regular -pointsize 48 label:'രജീഷ്' img_magick.png

Nice!