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.