Year in review: 2019

The biggest news in 2019 has to be Janayugom's move to Scribus - this is a landmark event since this is the first time an entirely free software based stack is used to produce a newspaper in Malayalam.

The year 2019 saw a few significant software releases useful for end users - Gayathri font (SMC), TN Joy font (RIT), updated versions of Indic Keyboard and Chilanka/Meera fonts among them. There were also some significant computing tools released such as mlmorph and the speech corpus collection project.

We saw members of our community being honored with awards this year. Jishnu (Indic Keyboard) was honoured with Mozilla Open Source Support award in March 2019. Santhosh Thottingal was honoured with the President's Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman for 2019 in August.

There were a number of smaller meetups and summits where members of SMC members presented papers, participated in training as well as translation efforts.

All in all, 2019 has been a landmark year, and proved once again that FOSS works for the Malayalee, beyond doubt.

December

• Wordpress Word Camp held at Kochi
• Malayalam Computing workshop at Kerala University.
• SMC fonts for Android released with support for Android 10.
• KDE translathon organized in Kochin and Thrissur.
• Subin's transliteration tool featured on news.

November

• KDE Malayalam Localization moves to Weblate
• Grafematik Conference Proceedings with paper by SMC released
• Malayalam computing efforts featured on Bhashaposhini Magazine
• MSC featured in newspaper
• Workshop on Administrative Language and Malayalam Computing conducted in Aleppy Disctrict Panchayat

October

• Janayugam Adopts Unicode and Moves to Free software
• Janayugom Edit (Freaknz-qt) Released
• Unicode Malayalam Font - TN Joy Released
• Malayalam Speech Corpus Project Commenced
• Santhosh Thottingal Honoured with Pradeepan Pambirikkunnu Memorial Award
• Summit on Self-Reliant Publishing: Free Software for Publishing Industry
• Calamares Malayalam Localization Completed
• SMC Signs AccessNow WhyID letter
• SMC Supports GNOME Foundation's Fight Against a Patent Troll

September

• Magisk Malayalam Fonts Hits Version 2.0
• Calamares is available in Malayalam
• mlmorph Version 1.0.7 Released

August

• Santhosh Thottingal Honoured wins the President's Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman for 2019
• Manjari, Gayathri and Chilanka available at Google Fonts
• Malayalam Morphology Analyzer at Machine Translation Summit 2019

July

• Atomic smc fonts packages for Fedora
• Standalone application for Varnam project
• Debian Buster released with Malayalam localization.

June

• Web interface for mlmorph revised.
• released initial version of Markov chain based word predictor
• Reghu Malayalam font updated with bug fixes
• mlmorph hits version 1.0.6
• Sruthi become first Indian woman Debian Developer
• Chilanka v1.400 released

May

• Lexicon curation webapp for mlmorph released.
• PanchayatWiki Workshops

April

• Mozilla Common Voice Project website and other Mozilla projects localized to Malayalam

March

• MOSS Award for Indic Keyboard
• Malayalam Support in Lyx
• Malayalam Named Entity Recognition released
• LibreOffice Spell Checker beta released
• Gayathri 1.100 Released
• Meera font updated with a major bug fix.

February

• Gayathri released
• Jaisen Nedumpala honored by local self governance department, Kerala

January

• Swanalekha for Windows and Mac devices.
• Grandham project realeased public API.
• Mastodon localized to Malayalam.