I am blogging after a long break. Last entry was posted during foss.in. In between I posted some occasional responses on my Malayalam blog. But some situations force me to blog, and this is one such

I am specifically referring to recent posts by Pravin Satpute and Rahul Balerao. Since they already set the flame on Planet FLOSS india and Planet Fedora , I am contributing my share to it

Some Background

• Swathanthra Malayalam computing (SMC) team was reorganised in 2006 September by Praveen & me and it developed a lot of tools and improved malayalam support in GNU/Linux Desktop. We feel our major achievement is contributing atleast 20 new developers committed to free software.
• SMC works on upstream, but running our own yum repositories for Fedora 6, 7, & 8 & CentOS 5 and apt repositories for Debian etch, lenny & sid to support old versions in use & to address the delay in getting projects/patches in upstream.

Malayam Rendering & Fonts

• While working on Malayalam Rendering Issues the first bug we need to clear was a bug created by Rahul Balerao by fixing rendering engine against a buggy font called Lohit malayalam. ( ref#357790 and this flickr image). Later Rahul understood his mistake and was ready to work with us for fixing upstream bugs.
• We started with a pango patch by Suruma for perfect malayalam rendering. It was a rendering engine patch + font patch based solution to the issues regarding the shaping of post-base forms of consonants viz. YA,RA,LA & VA , in certain contexts when they are the rendered in pango & QT Treating them as ordinary consonants in the shaping engine means they can be used with ‘akhand’ tag in the font substitution table.ie, the respective form will appear whenever we input followed by the above mentioned consonant, irrespective of the context.
• Another issue solved is the post GSUB reordering of the isolated RA sign(used in reformed script),wherein it should be placed in front of the base glyph.This reordering is still to be achieved by any of the rendering mechanisms except the uniscribe.Moreover, using the post base forms for RA and LA leads to weird shaping results when they are followed by NGA, RA, RRA etc. and may more
• Suresh Worked on restoring uniscribe rendoring support in font and solved shaping issues of post-base forms of YA and VA at font level by adding half form(pre base).The half forms for other consonants are also used for the better shaping of complex syllabic cluster. This leads to 04 version of SMC fonts. It is compatible to upstream pango now.
• Only bug remaining in pango now is the Bug #441654 . A work around is available to fix it. But not accepted in upstream yet.
• In the meantime SMC developed new Traditional fonts Meera (K.H Hussain & Suresh P), Dyuthi (Hiran & K.H Hussain) following the model of Rachana Movement , which restored the traditional script of the language. Meera font become very popular and is now used/recommented by 2 major newspapers (Mathrubhumi & Mangalam) for their online versions.
• Praveen fixed/tested most of the upstream bugs on Mozilla Firefox 3.0 related to Indic rendering and Indic Printing

Reply to Pravin Satpute’s Posts

1. In your post comparing Rachana & Meera fonts , you seem to be unaware of the differences between fonts. In Malayalam we only have 51 basic alphabets but we have nearly 1000 glyphs in usage. Unlike latin, font perfomance for indic languages need to be measured based on how it performs with conjuncts. I am not joining with Malayali-non-malayali comments on the post. But people may get angry while seeing the bugs in Lohit and its design mistakes.(see last part of my post for more details on this). Language is always linked with peoples emotions .
2. Relative size seems to be your major point. Meera using Ascent = 560, Descent = 440, for Em size 1000 while Lohit-malayalam is using Ascent = 650, Descent = 374, for Em size 1024. Meera is using smaller sizes to prevent cutting of glyphs below baseline because it is a traditional lipi font.Relative satus can be configured using proper fontconf scripts. We already used it in SMC Debian Repository.
3. You did a great job in packaging smc-fonts for Fedora9. But In the post you are saying ” license inside fonts but not easily viewable, person should have fontforge or any other font tool to actually see that license” . It is a bug with Gnome font Viewer & not with the font. See bug #407605 . So detaching Licence text is not the right solution.

Reply to Rahul Bhalerao’s comments & advices

• On the post Lohit Fedora & Community , Rahul starts with the the complaint “huge agitation by Malayalam community” . Does fedora thinks reporting bugs is “agitation”? We are just showing the issues we have come across. We also helped him. Accepting issues and solution to better the technology is the duty of a good programming artist. And Hiran Venugoplan, a student & font developer with SMC helped him to fix Lohit-malayalam’s critical bugs . It is available for download here. It still works better than the official 2.2.1 Version of Lohit-malayalam against Upsteam pango

For downloading the new version I went to https://www.fedorahosted.org/lohit it says Current release: lohit-fonts-2.2.1.tar.gz (355 KB) but the link points to 2.2.0 release. I Manually corrected link and got the font from http://rbhalera.fedorapeople.org/released/lohit/lohit-fonts-2.2.1.tar.gz based on the version number given on the Rahul’s blog. The Font still have critical bugs with rendering of RA sign in conjuncts . It is also visibile in the screenshot provided by rahul. see the screenshot with marked mistakes

• I am not in favour of malayali vs non-malayali debate. But Can you think why people are becoming angry?. After reporting bugson lohit in 2007 beginning, and after community offered help, it has not been fixed till date. And first Instruction in SMC Fedora Repos are yum remove lohit-fonts-malayalam
• Your Contribution is not much in solving rendering issues of Malayalam till date and you created enough harm for malayalam rendering. Without your help language community studied it and found the solutions. People may get angry when you are claiming the authority without contributing your ability.
• Inclusion of smc-fonts in Fedora 9 gives you the authority to blame SMC for pointing bugs . But i am considering it is not as a “favour” but as your duty. I am sure without its inclusion you will loose the merit of Language support, because all you have are 2 typewriter script fonts , Lohit-malayalam & samyak-malayalam(Fixed by Hiran Venugopalan). Most of the people who are using Malayalam in Fedora are already using SMC repositories for Fedora 6, 7, and 8.
• See the below image for current rendering bugs in Lohit. Also read the section on Design mistakes in Lohit-malayalam. I am comparing it with Meera a Traditional Lipi font and Raghu-Malayalam, a typewriter script font by R.K Joshi

Design Issues in Lohit-malayalam glyphs

These issues are listed with the help of Hiran Venugoplan, who helped rahul to fix critical bugs in Lohit Malayalam and Samyak-Malayalam. (both are in Fedora 9). For the analysis I have used the Lohit Malayalam font that Fedora 9 contains as its default font. Its just an analysis, not comparision with any other. Issues over rendering is not discussed here.

• In general, the glyphs are just drawn and not designed scientifically. The font as per my analysis is done by using only one font as for reference, which is unfair while design a language which designer does not uses and knows. The size of circles, curves, proportions as foursquare is impressive. The circles need more radius, more lovely curves to be added to glyphs in order to attain better visibility.
• The previously considered four square, is a method that calligraphist suggests over Malayalam language. By that they suggest to divide the glyph to four parts using one vertical and other horizontal lines (as Rule of the thirds in photography). The calligraphist suggest for equal quantity of ink/darkness for all squares (exceptions are there).
• Malayalam digit 0 : The glyph contains a circle, which is NOT the Malayalam digit ZERO.
• Lohit Malayalam contains indo-arabic numbers : As far as I know, no other lohit fonts contains the numeral glyphs, U+0004 to U+000D. As lohit is done in a way “let other fonts replace the unknown”, they where not necessary. The design of numerals is not matching with Malayalam glyphs, in shape and in size.
• Vocalic R : The design of Vocalic R (U+0D43) is imperfect, irregular and unattractive. The glyph design starts before the LBearing hence in certain cases the glyph is overlaps the previous.



• Malayalam digits 3 (U+0D6A) and 9 (U+0D6F) : The glyph used for 3 and 9 digit representation is the similar to that of glyphs 0×00f2 and 00×00f1 respectively. This causes confusion while reading, typing and can cause spoofing.

• Proportion of vertical combination glyphs : The major problem the lohit has is that it fails over readability over screen and print which is supposed to be the major karma for a default typographic language font. The glyphs from glyph157 to glyph165, of X + la form, the size of joined part to X (which represents la) is imperfect, over sized. Similar disproportions can be seen widely over the font for vertical glyphs, glyph152 glyph154 glyph155 glyph202 and so. 0×010D is also having issue over proportion.

• For the same vertical glyphs, the vertical size relation between two such glyphs are not same and hence makes issue over readability as it make the reader a thought that he is reading a zigzag content.

• The issues are still more over readability. The font is unimpressive in screen and unreadable in papers. It is quite disappointing to see version of fedora is the one which contain many Malayalam localisation efforts and packages with such a unimpressive font as its default font. A bad font results in bad computing.

See The video from FOSS EXPO Gnome stall in FOSS.IN/2007

Karunakar Rocks!!!

Conclusion: Total Time needed to open an OLPC Laptop is 2.52 Minutes (including time taken to takeout Battery)

Thanks to Santhosh for the video

Ben Lisbakken writes an faq for usinggoogle gears +greasemonkey to make anysite available offline by describing Wikipedia as an example.
Greasemonkey script for offline wikipedia is here

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) got widespread support from malayalam mainstream print media for the 2 day (14th & 15th september) software freedom day celebration & the release of 7 software packages developed during last year. It is the time to look at our history.

SMC is reactivated from a dead state, as a result of personal discussions with praveen, hiran & vimaljoseph in the sidelines of GPLv3 Conference in bangalore. The new team is setup at last year SFD celebrations in Thrissur. Suresh, Baiju(the founder of SMC), Hussain KH (rachana), Anwar, Students in GEC etc also joined in the team at that time. Now we have more than 30 developers+localizers. The astounding progress within the short span of time is described below

• December 2006: Debian Installer is Fully Translated into Malayalam ( The Work of Debian malayalam, a sub team of Swathanthra malayalam computing)
• January 2007: Santhosh Thottingal of SMC done a complete architectural rewrite of Dhvani, the Indian language text to speech system by Ramesh hariharan & added Malayalam support to It.
• March 2007 : participated & Conducted workshops in FOSS Meet@NITC, Kozhikkode
• March 2007: Swathanthra Malayalam Computing selected as a participating Organisation ( and only Indian Organisation) in Google Summer of Code Project. 5 projects were allotted.
• April 2007: GNU aspell supported Malayalam (major issues are resolved)
• May 2007: Swanalekha: a Phonetic Input scheme for malayalam using SCIM
• June 2007: Lalitha, Bolnagiri based xkb keyboard for malayalam by Jinesh
• July 2007: Added pango support to Tuxtype by Mobin M as part of GSoC work. Now Tuxtype is usable for all Indian languages
• August 2007: Malayalam Matrix screen saver Release, & First Public Release of Aspell- malayalam spellchecker with More than 137000 words list (It is the largest Indian Language Aspell wordlist. Second is hindi with 25000 words).
• September 2007: Gnome Officially supports malayalam in Gnome 2.20 with More than 80% translations
• September 2007: Sarika : The first Free Indian language speech recognition engine is developed by Shyam K (as a part of GsoC). It Currently identifies more than 50 malayalam words
• September 2007: Tuxtype malayalam is Released by Mobin.M & friends (Vimal, Shreyas, Sreeranj, Prince)
• Meera , a Malayalam Traditional opentype font with more than 900 glyphs is released under GNU GPL by Hussain K.H and Suresh P . It is developed for Suruma renderering scheme (not compatible with Uniscribe scheme for windows) . Authors are working on a Uniscribe compatible (windows) version now

Pramode Sir wrote:

A society and a culture is identified by its language - once the language is dead, the society starts losing its identity. A good way to keep a language alive is to take it to the digital world - the world of the PC/Communication devices and the Internet. This is one context in which developing regional language computing environments and popularising them has great significance.

The theme for the 2 day event was “Swathantra Software and Malayalam computing” . Free software is touching the lives of common man now !!

The new Joke from the buggy Orkut- The most ugly product from google. It says Iceweasel, a rebranding of firefox as a not supported browser

They are recommending the use of Firefox 1.5 or IE6.0 while using Iceweasel 2.0.0.6 . It seems their check depending only on useragents

Shame on you google.

(Iceweasel is a rebranding of Firefox by Debian to make it compatible with Debain Free software guidelines.)

Dr. Nagarjuna Writes in FSF-Friends List

India votes against ooxml unanimously. the decision of the committee was to disapprove ooxml with comments. The final meeting took place today after 3pm for about an hour and half, and no voting took place.

Venkitesh Hariharan also reports it.
Todays Economic Times & business standard picked up the story.
ET report says

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

Some quick links on Background of this campaign:

Update:
Brazil also Decided No to OOXML yesterday:-)

Yesterday Indian Republic marked its 60th anniversary (an average Indian’s life time) of its independence. yet another Independence Day for the people of India to openly talk of secession.

About the secession of the Indian state from the citizens it is supposed to serve.

The secession of Indian politicians from the people they are supposed to represent.

The secession of the Indian rich from the fate of their fellow Indians.

The secession of India’s educated from the basic values of their own education (with values replaced by the price of their souls)

The secession of the idea of development from the real needs of the Indian people leaving only a trail of destruction and displacement.

As Independent India approaches the age of sixty- that magical sum of five cycles of 12 years each - it is time to tell the truth about our country.

Bob Sutor’s Open Blog Points to Ben Langhinrichs‘ s Post on some interesting stats via Google on the relative number of ODF vs. OOXML documents on the web. His numbers show that there are 162,700 ODF documents vs. 1993 OOXML documents, and 26% of the OOXML documents are on microsoft.com

As a tribute to Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish peer-to-peer activists who created the Pirate Bay (a Bittorrent tracker web site) have set up a tracker site called Bergman Bits to help people download Bergman’s films via Bittorrent:

Bergman Bits says

With the death of Ingmar Bergman, one of the last great film creators, an era has passed away. An era where cinema was the supreme medium, dominating the cultural landscape and powerful men could direct and dictate our inner most feelings and desires with mass media.

For good or worse, we now live in the time of the great distributed networks where all of us have the powers of communication and creation at our hands. Despite Bergman, lets not wish the time of mass media back, but let it silently pass away with a final gasp.

As big fans of Bergmans work, we decided to make a tribute site to the films he created and we all love. We want to help people share these works and hope that even though Ingmar is no longer with us more people will experience the films and enjoy them as much as we have.

His 54 Films are available to download (Hets Frenzy/Torment (1944) to Saraband (2003)) in Bittorrent format from