To celebrate the birth of Kerala on November 1st, the southernmost state in India with around 35 million people speaking its language Malayalam; Rachana Institute of Typography is announcing the release of ‘Ezhuthu/എഴുത്ത്’ — a handwriting/script style Unicode font with traditional orthography.
The glyphs are drawn by famed calligrapher Narayana Bhattathiri. The hand-drawn characters are turned to vector graphics which are then transformed to font shapes and this typography is done by Hussain KH who lead the Rachana Aksharavedi movement and designed popular fonts such as Rachana, Meera, Meera Inimai etc. The fine tuned typeface need OpenType shaping to correctly shape and render advanced conjunct character formations in Malayalam. The OpenType feature development, integration and technical infrastructure is worked on by me, Rajeesh. Ashok Kumar and CVR made key contributions to the font development.
A PDF document specimen is available at http://books.sayahna.org/ml/pdf/ezhuthu.pdf
Download the font at http://rachana.org.in/downloads/Ezhuthu-Regular.ttf
Ezhuthu is made available under libre license — Open Font License, which makes it free to download, use, distribute and enhance without restrictions by the general public, designers, institutions and government departments. We are proud to add a unique font to the collection of freely available Malayalam fonts. If you find any issues, report those in the source repository.
Soliloquies 
6 responses to “Announcing ‘Ezhuthu/എഴുത്ത് ’ — a handwriting/script style font for Malayalam”
Here is a link to the pdf using the font, Ezhuthu: http://books.sayahna.org/ml/pdf/ezhuthu.pdf
Thank you, updated post with the URL.
[…] the release of Ezhuthu, I received a few reports that in Adobe InDesign/Photoshop that some matras appear outside the […]
download link please
http://rachana.org.in/downloads/Ezhuthu-Regular.ttf
Link is already provided in the post, but I guess it could be more visible. Updated.
Download Ezhuthu handwriting App