SMC Monthly Report: September 2024
EventsSMC WebsiteSMC new website launched in Bengaluru. Riya Sabu volunteered to initiate the new website,
Indic subtitler is an open source subtitle generator for Indic Languages. Supported by SeamlessM4T, faster-whisper, WhisperX and Vegam-Whisper which support almost 12 Indic languages by default.
Read more about Indic Subtitler: https://indicsubtitler.in/about
Fontra (https://fontra.xyz/) is an upcoming browser-based font editor from Google. It is not yet completely ready for serious usage, but it already has several useful features. Santhosh Thottingal has made a public instance of it available at https://fontra.thottingal.in - People interested in typeface design can use this tool to load the listed fonts, inspect glyph design, and for variable fonts, inspect the masters and their interpolation. All features are read-only, so you cannot make edits there.
Varnam IBus Engine had a new release at #FOSSMeet24. It now works in Wayland and has Nepali support. Thanks to mistersmee and khumnath for the contributions! (link to release)
Poorna - The complete Malayalam keyboard layout has introduced a web-based editor that allows users to explore all the keyboard layouts offered by Poorna without the need for installation. Additionally, users can upload TXT files and conveniently edit them on the go.
See release blog
The metapost sandbox application, designed to quickly try metapost based design and outputs, got some feature updates. Now you can save your samples, share it with others. Saved samples can be retrieved and edited later by its author. Others can work on it by creating a copy. No login required.
The ongoing Malini typeface design project had more alpha releases this month. See https://gitlab.com/smc/fonts/Malini.
malayalam-fonts npm package released new version 1.0.6-beta.3 (npm package)
Tweet link: https://twitter.com/MervinPraison/status/1766796706438426961
Code: https://github.com/TeluguLLMLabs/Indic-gemma-7b-Navarasa
Models: https://huggingface.co/Telugu-LLM-Labs
https://twitter.com/VikParuchuri/status/1765440195124691339
Tweet Link: https://twitter.com/ycombinator/status/1765497664240759133
The researchers behind the AI4Bharat also published a paper titled "Do Not Worry if You Do Not Have Data: Building Pretrained Language Models Using Translationese" which evaluates the approach of using machine translated training data.
As part of OpenData Day, Sahya Digital Conservation Foundation and OpenDataKerala Community ran a 3-day residential hackathon and datathon at Vythiri, Wayanad. They created and improved the projects and tools related to OpenData ecosystems, and also ran a Datathon at OpenStreetMap and Wikidata.
#OpenData Day 2024 by @opendatakerala at Vythiri, Wayanad, Kerala with a weekend Hackathon and Datathon with @asdofindia, @Athul111, @rajaneesh_river, @jinoytomjacob and expecting more peoples to join.#OpenStreetMap #Wikidata #Biodiversity pic.twitter.com/DNUjfSsbLs
— Manoj Karingamadathil (@manojkmohan) March 2, 2024
We organized an online talk session on Malayalam Digital Aesthetics ("മലയാളത്തിന്റെ ഡിജിറ്റൽ സൗന്ദര്യം") on March 9th at 7 PM. The talk was about digital Malayalam typography.
You can see the live stream here:
The slides are available at https://santhoshtr.github.io/malayalam-digital-aesthetics/
Some SMC volunteers participated in FOSSMeet'24, NIT Calicut during March 22-24. We will be writing a separate blog for FOSSMeet.