SMC Malayalam fonts updated versions released

The Unicode fonts for Malayalam maintained by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing were last updated almost 2 years ago. They all were supporting just the v1 Indic opentype spec. But there were rendering problems with the fonts under Harfbuzz.

I was fortunate to attend the Open Source Language Summit 2012 (last year!) organized by Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat (thank you, guys!) where many of the Indic language experts came together to work on issues at hand. The 2-days workshop helped me greatly to get much more insight into fonts, opentype spec and Harfbuzz in general. Since then I have been spending a lot of effort in updating and fixing the Malayalam fonts and also testing git snapshots of Harfbuzz and reporting issues to harfbuzz development list.

In the meantime, Harfbuzz matured enough and fixed many rendering issues. Thanks to the last Udupi hackfest by Behdad and Jonathan Kew, all known issues with Malayalam shaping has been addressed. And we were busy updating the fonts, opentype lookup rules and fixing bugs to work with old shapers (old pango, Qt, ICU Layout Engine, Windows XP) as well as the new ones (Harfbuzz, Uniscribe, Adobe). The v1 Indic opentype spec was a mess due to ‘undesirable’ Halant reordering (Consonant+Halant forms were ligated while it should have been Halant+Consonant). It has caused a lot of grief on the font developers and shaping engine developers side. With the v2 spec (mlm2 script tag for Malayalam), this has been changed and there is no need to perform Halant shifting anymore by shaping engines. I was leading the effort of porting to mlm2 spec of Malayalam fonts. We could port only Meera and Rachana for now, and RaghuMalayalam taken care by a few sed scripts.

During the 12th anniversary celebrations of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing group, the new version of fonts (5.1 supporting old shapers and 6.0 supporting new shapers) were released. See the email to smc-discuss for details. Remaining fonts also need to be updated, there is interest from community to collaborate on that. The new release will show up in Fedora 20.

In the process, I have learned quite some intricacies of the Indic opentype spec and would try to document them in a series of posts.

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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 !