[smc-discuss] Other Free Fonts with Malayalam Glyphs

[Santhosh Thottingal]

On Monday, March 17, 2014, Baiju M <baiju.m.mail at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It looks like GNU Freefont maintenance is very active, probably
> we should send patches to that project. Any takers ?


I used to give patches for the Malayalam issues in GNU Freefont. See one
example:
http://lists.smc.org.in/pipermail/discuss-smc.org.in/2012-November/014396.html

GNU FreeSerif uses Rachana glyphs for Malayalam. Some time back the
maintainer wanted new orthography for Malayalam in Free Serif with Rachana
font. So Rachana glyphs and tables were changed drastically to support new
orthography. I informed my objection on that approach and then a combined
approach was attempted. ie, to support both orthography with the same font,
with traditional orthography as default one. Applications that allow
orthography selection using tags(MLR for Malayalam reformed) can then
select Modern orthography. TeX, CSS3 etc apparently support this. While
this was being attempted, harfbuzz development was active. So the font
ended up with incompatible/broken opentype tables. It also failed in
achieving the goal of two orthography support. The last version Steve White
sent to me was doing the reverse - using modern orthography by default even
though traditional Malayalam was indented to be default. It had a lot of
rendering mistakes too, not to mention aesthetic issues.

I had a long debate with Steve White in personal emails about the direction
the project going. I lost interest and stopped giving patches. IMO It takes
a lot of effort to bring back it in a functional form. Distros are shipping
a broken version and I hear complaints about this every time. Uninstall GNU
FreeFont was the advice I used to give, even though I am sad about it.

I did not check the current font in the version control.

Thanks
Santhosh
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.smc.org.in/pipermail/discuss-smc.org.in/attachments/20140317/5e3e289d/attachment-0003.htm>