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

Chathans

A few months ago, one fine morning I logged into #smc-project IRC channel. An unusual number of members were present on that day, and we were completing the process of getting aspell-ml into Fedora. Meanwhile, Santhosh and Nishan were in the process of creating an ASCII-to-Unicode converter. The discussions and talks went light, and we went into a myriad of topics. Somehow, the discussion turned into Ani Peter’s “blog inauguration“, and then Santhosh pointed out at my Malayalam blog. That prompted him to ask if I am a fan of V.K.N. I said yes, and he replied the feeling is mutual. But a few guys in the list didn’t know who “Payyan” is, or “Chathans” is.

Payyans and Chathans are arguably the most famous characters by this exceptional genius V.K.N.

Few days later, Santhosh and Nishan released the ASCII-to-Unicode converter, and they named the software as “Payyans” !

Couple of weeks after, I was trying to learn GTK+ programming, and Glade. As an experiment, I wrote a small GUI for Payyans in GTK, which resulted in a patch to Payyans and a tiny GTK+ application, which I duly named as “Chathans”.

A few months withered away, I learned a little PyGTK programming, and I rewrote Chathans in PyGTK. Payyans was also improved in a substantial way, gaining internal APIs, so that services of Payyans can be used directly inside Python applications, feature for bidirectional conversion et al. I have added the ability for translation to Chathans later.

So, we have released Chathans, documented the steps to obtain, install and use in SMC wiki.

As always – comments, bug reports and patches are welcome.