July 3, 2018

SMC Monthly Report: June 2018

Monthly working report for June, 2018. SMC presented a paper on impacts of orthographic reformations in Malayalam at Grafematik-18, updates on Malayalam Morphological Analyser, Font development workflow etc.

Grafematik 2018

Santhosh Thottingal and Kavya Manohar presented a paper on 'Malayalam orthographic reforms: impact on language and popular culture' at Graphematik conference held at IMT Atlantique, Brest, France.

The paper presented is available here and the presentation is available here. All the talk videos of Grafematik 2018 are available in the conference website.

Malayalam Morphological Analyser

  • Grammatical moods are fine tuned.
  • A set of guidelines are being drafted for interested developers to work on various applications on top of the mlmorph. For example, have a look at Spell checker Plan.

This project is lead by Santhosh Thottingal.

Font Development Workflow Update

All the font repos (except Suruma) now have similar build-release-tag workflow. All of the old fonts (anything before Manjari) will generate ttf, woff and woff2 outputs, make necssary tarballs and trigger an update to the website fonts page when a new release is made. Manjari will generate otf output in addition to others.

This is a part of ongoing work done by Balasankar C.

Save Our Privacy Campaign

We have officially endorsed #SaveOurPrivacy Campaign. This campaign intends to put forward a model draft law to build awareness, knowledge and discussion on specific and nuanced issues of privacy, data protection, interception and surveillance. Localization efforts are undergoing.
We request individuals and organizations to do the same.

In news:

  • Unicode 11 released. Mango emoji encoded. Read release note here.
  • Chief Minister of Kerala released a spellchecker for Malayalam which is jointly developed by ICFOSS and AUKBC.
  • John Hudson, designer of Nirmala family of fonts explains the design constraints including Nirmala Malayalam at TYPO Labs 2018.
  • Keyman 10 released. This is the first major release after Tavultesoft made source code public. Release note of Keyman from SIL can be read here.
  • Amazon Kindle now supports installing custom fonts. Now it is possible to read ebooks in free fonts designed by SMC and others in Kindle. A detailed guide for custom font installation can be found here and read official release notes here .