THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The history of Malayalam computing is only over a decade old. But the font, one constituent of the Malayalam we use in computers, was in the making even before, according to Mr Santhosh Thottingal, a Malayalam computing expert. “In the 1970s, government institutions started using typewriters. But the English typewriters could not be used to type Malayalam language. More than 1,000 characters were needed,” he said. He was not born at the time and was not associated with Malayalam computing until 2006. But he narrated, keenly like he witnessed it first, how the government decided to constitute a commission-- Sooranad Kunjanpillai Lipi Parishkarana commission-- to simplify Malayalam, only because English typewriters could not accommodate the complex language.
There was resistance from printing presses, though the government urged them to start using the new script. In the 1990s, with the advent of computers, the State Institute of Languages decided to simplify Malayalam even more. It was at this point that the lovers of the ‘original Malayalam script’ came together to form ‘Rachana Aksharavedi’ and create ‘Rachana’ font with 1,128 characters. In 2002, ‘Swatantra Malayalam Computing’ was formed. In a few years, the first Malayalam font based on free software, ‘Rachana’, was designed by K.H. Hussain. Mr Santhosh has designed the fonts ‘Manjari’ and ‘Chilanka.’
“Malayalam is a very complex language. The sentence structure is different from English. Some letters are a combination of many letters and sounds. For example, ‘pna’ consists of the letter ‘pa’, the sound ‘u’ and letter ‘na’. The computer recognises this sequence and turns it into the complex letter ‘pna’. Complex letter rendering is very difficult. It took us about ten years to help the machine understand Malayalam,” he said. Malayalam computing needs more people who are willing to contribute, he added.
