April 5, 2019

MOSS Award for Indic Keyboard, Malayalam Support in LyX, NER using mlmorph and More: SMC Monthly Updates Mar 2019

MOSS Award for Indic Keyboard

Many keyboard apps are developed based on Indic Keyboard.

Indic Keyboard - Free/libre, privacy aware keyboard for android devices which supports 23 Indic family of languages and 57 layouts - has been awarded the prestigious Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) award.

“Traditionally,  free and open source projects are characterised by a slow development  process, driven by passionate engineers. Awards such as this will enable  the developer to dedicate more time for the project,”
says Anivar Aravind, Executive Director of Indic Project at SMC.

Indic Keyboard's creator-maintainer Jishnu Mohan will utilize the award for future developments of the project.
Enthusiasts were welcomed to join beta channel and discussion group.

Malayalam Support in Lyx

LyX, a popular graphical front end for LaTeX, now supports the Malayalam language. By next release onwards, LyX will be having native support for Malayalam. Malayalam support patch was developed by Joice Joseph with inputs from Akshay S. Dinesh. They have authored jointly a dedicated "how-to" tutorial including installation instructions.  

Malayalam Morphological Analyser Updates

Malayalam Named Entity Recognition

Malayalam named entity recognition example using https://morph.smc.org.in/ner

Named Entity Recognition (NER) - One of the most sought applications of the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is now available for Malayalam texts. Santhosh Thottingal, who designed NER based on mlmorph library, has published a detailed note on the same.

LibreOffice Spell Checker

Spellchecker in action- libreoffice writer.

Santhosh Thottingal's efforts on making a fully functional spell checker for Malayalam continues. First private beta of Malayalam spell checker based on the mlmorph library is released for LibreOffice. Bugs and feature requests are requested to report on project repository.  Installation can be carried out by following detailed installation guide.

Gayathri 1.100 Released

Document using Gayathri

Version 1.100 of the latest Malayalam font from SMC, Gayathri released. Developed by Binoy Dominic and Kavya Manohar, the project was coordinated by Santhosh thottingal. Gayathri can be downloaded from fonts portfolio.

Meera font updated with a major bug fix.

Wrong chandrakkala position before consonant in InDesign.

Meera version 7.0.2 released. The font had a serious bug with samvrithokaram rules specific to Adobe InDesign. It misplaces samvrithokaram / dot reph to previous consonant/conjunct. Rajeesh KV have fixed the issue and wrote a detailed note as well.