The upcoming Fedora release 36 (due end of April 2022) and beyond, and ELN (Enterprise Linux Next, what would become RHEL) will have default Malayalam script fonts as RIT Rachana and Meera New fonts. In addition, Sundar, TNJoy, Panmana and Ezhuthu fonts are now available in the official repositories. This brings Malayalam fonts that are modern (Unicode 13 compatible), well-maintained, having perfect complex-script shaping and good metadata to the users of Fedora, RHEL, CentOS & downstream OSen. I have made all the necessary updates in the upstream projects (which I maintain) and packaged them for Fedora (which also I maintain).
Update: thanks to Norbert Preining, all these fonts are also available for ArchLinux!
RIT Rachana and Meera New fonts will be default serif and sans-serif fonts for Malayalam. smc-rachana-fonts and smc-meera-fonts are deprecated as they are unmaintained.
All the fonts can be installed from your favourite package managers (GNOME Software, Discover, dnf etc.).
The packages can be installed using dnf via:
sudo dnf install -y rit-*-fonts
This change in Fedora required many well orchestrated steps:
- Packaging & building RIT fonts according to latest font packaging guidelines
- Set as default serif/sans-serif fonts for Malayalam in
langpacks - Set as default serif/sans-serif fonts for Malayalam in
fedora-comps - Propose the ChangeRequest which is then discussed & approved by Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCO).
I would like to especially thank Parage Nemade for coordinating all the changes and relevant engineering procedures, and Pravin Satpute for initial discussions; in helping to complete these updates in time for Fedora 36.
Soliloquies 
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Hi
just to let you know, I have packaged the fonts for Arch Linux in AUR, and will do some tests with LaTeX (XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX) since I have done something similar before with other fonts. Thanks a lot for your work!
That is super; thanks a bunch, Norbert!
I was going to ask you the trouble of packaging these for Debian; but I know you may not like to 🙂
Yeah, sorry for that, but it is out of my hands 😦 Stupid politics. But I do my best to promote your efforts.
Hey is it expected that the malayalam fonts are tiny on Fedora 36 ?
Depends on the expectation: compared to what?
Bear in mind that Indic fonts have very different metrics compared to Latin fonts.
I am comparing to Windows and Android. The text is so tiny that its almost unreadable. I had opened an issue https://gitlab.com/rit-fonts/MeeraNew/-/issues/2