The Malayalam script is one of the most complex scripts in India. What factors affected the timeline, and how have you noticed Malayalam content changing online in the past decade? You write that Malayalam script is relatively new to the digital age. Government programs and IT education helped to deliver these results to Malayalam users. We also participated in Google Summer of Code several times. The community project became a larger group of volunteers. And we continued to work on more complex projects. We developed input tools, fixed rendering issues, designed and developed new fonts, and defined and implemented many computational algorithms for Malayalam like collation, hyphenation. By 2010, we had worked with various free software upstream projects to build this computing infrastructure for Malayalam. I don’t have any training with computational linguistics. This was the first challenge we had to solve. Rendering engines could not handle many complexities of Malayalam script. Malayalam did not have functional bug free fonts (not only in free software but in proprietary operating systems too). There was a community project named Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, which had also stalled. I also found out that the Free Software Foundation of India did have some efforts in this direction, but that they had stalled because they did not get enough developers. It is at that time, I realized that, our computers had so many limitations with Malayalam, my mother tongue. After my education, I got my first job, and I started working on small free software projects and joined local free software community. When I was studying at engineering college (2001–2005) I was introduced to the free software philosophy and fascinated by its impact and potential. What initially sparked your interest in helping Malayalam be more widely supported in digital spaces? We reached out to Thottingal to learn more about creating fonts, and his other projects related to digital access. Of the <20 fonts that are available for Malayalam, he maintains and/or has engineered about 12 (the others are maintained by organizations including Google, Microsoft, Indian Type Foundry etc.). For the past decade, he has concentrated on creating high quality fonts for the script that is used for writing his native language Malayalam. Thottingal led the engineering work on the Content Translation tool, released in 2014, and designs and then develops work that helps MediaWiki support hundreds of languages.īut outside of work, Thottingal is known for creating solutions that help languages be better supported by software. When the INR 500 currency was released last year in India, it featured a Malayalam font that was engineered by Santhosh Thottingal, a Senior Software Engineer on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Collaboration team.
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