Dear friends and well wishers,
This email is to notify you that the Rachana group has released the first public version of the Rachana OTF font for Malayalam Traditional Orthography.
It is available at
www.stendekrnd.com/rachana/rachana.html
We welcome your comments, suggestions and other communications. Also, please forward this message to lists and indiiduals who are interested in this sort of thing.
Following is a copy of the Readme file which is also included the package.
Thank you, Rajeev J Sebastian
README for RachanaMedium.otf ----------------------------
The Rachana Medium OTF represents merely one artifact of the extensive work of Shri Chitrajakumar R and Shri KH Hussein, as leaders of the Rachana Akshara Vedhi on the linguistics and information processing models for the Malayalam language, and for Indic family of languages in general. The wealth of their experience and their love of their mother tongue is visible in each and every glyph of this font.
Rachana Akshara Vedhi is the first font to provide a comprehensive set of glyph shapes for the entire character repertoire of Malayalam Traditional orthography, under the GNU GPL. The Rachana set of glyphs were initially developed in 1999, then released by Richard M Stallman at Cochin University of Science and Technology under the GNU GPL. At that time, it consisted of a set of TTF fonts. These fonts were further expanded by around 100 more glyphs, along with integration with the Unicode model, and the result is this Rachana Medium OTF font.
Other members of the Rachana Akshara Vedhi, who were also instrumental in bringing out this font:
Dr P. Vijayakumaran Nair (Kerala Forest Research Institute) N. Gangadharan (Malayalam Lexicon) Subash Kuriakose (Kerala Forest Research Institute, Peechi)
The following have also contributed immensely towards the creation of the font:
Dr Mammen Chundamannil (Kerala Forest Research Institute) Rajeev J Sebastian (Stendek R&D) Anwar Ummer (FSUG-CUSAT) PM Hashim (Design Difference) Ramakrishnan M. (debian.org) Raghavendra Bhat (FSUG-Kochi)
Rachana Medium OTF typeface was developed using Free software: Fontforge (earlier versions are also called Pfaedit).
Legal Information -----------------
Rachana Medium OTF Font Copyright (C) 2004 Rachana Akshara Vedhi
This font is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This font is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this font; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Please see the LICENSE file for a detailed license agreement.
Questions ---------
All patches to this font, and any questions should be directed to rajeev_jsv@stendekrnd.com
Please prefix the word [Rachana] to the subject line
September 2, 2004 Rajeev J Sebastian