Malayalam moderns script and Lohit Mayalam

As you know we started working on Lohit Mayalam this month under the lohit2 project with planning number of improvement from standards, efficiency and effectiveness purpose. [1]

Sneha in between blogged regarding how we started working on Lohit Malayalam. [2]

After getting initial basic work done we got stuck on standard perspective. How the ligatures should be and what is attestation for same.

Earlier Lohit Malayalam was behaving bit different, cross checked with some modern script Malayalam fonts around like NotoSans, RaghuMalayalam. Gone through utrrs but still attestation was lacking.

Finally after bit searching remembered Govt. of India has Vishwabharat(विश्वभारत) [3] series where they write regarding each script of India.

 And we got good documentation for Malayalam modern orthography. We will refer to this and cross check with things around before the Alpha release of lohit-malayalam.




1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/12/lohit2-lohit-malayalam-development-plans.html
2. http://snehakore.blogspot.in/2013/12/the-way-we-proceed-with-malayalam.html
3. http://tdil.mit.gov.in/pdf/Vishwabharat/tdil-april-2002.zip

Lohit2: Lohit Malayalam development plans

    I am sure now everyone should be happy with Lohit Devanagari and Lohit
Gujarati releases. While looking back i see we have achieved objectives
planned [1] during the start of project. Its time to move towards other
scripts. Though Bengali, Gurumukhi, Tamil looks low hanging fruits we
want to fix bit more challenging scripts as well.

    We started thinking on what we can do in Lohit Malayalam in last
month. After couple of weeks of analyisis we found there is good scope
for improvement in Lohit Malayalam.

    Basic improvements as we done in Devanagari and Gujarati
    1. Following AGL. [2]
    2. Supporting points provided in Unicode chapter 9 for Malayalam script.
    3. Feature file separate for flexibility and reusability.
    4. Complete cleanup of existing Open type tables
    5. Supporting both "mlym" and "mlm2" open type specifications.
    6. Thorough testing with Harfbuzz and Uniscribe (WinXp, W7 and W8)

    Other fonts specific improvement.
    7. Presently Malayalam font has 281 shapes out of that we figure out
71 (+5/6) shapes are irrelevant. We can achieve these shapes with glyph
positioning and intelligent glyph substitution rules without affecting
fonts aesthetics and quality.
    8. We have some pending bugs on bugzilla [3] as well

    As we planned earlier making Lohit fonts most efficient and
effective is our primary objective. [1]

    Bit ambitious to say right now but i want make Lohit as a lightest
Malayalam modern script fonts.

    Sneha has already started working on lohit2 [4] git repo for
Malayalam font development.

   If you are looking any other suggestions or improvement in Lohit,
feel free to propose here.
 

1.
http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. https://sourceforge.net/adobe/aglfn/wiki/AGL%20Specification/
3.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&classification=Fedora&component=lohit-malayalam-fonts&list_id=2010178&product=Fedora&query_format=advanced
4. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2