Ardram - Updates
The project font "Ardram" is a calligraphy based ornamental font following the standards of SMC [Swathadra Malayalam Computing] in the original scripting pattern. The purpose of the project is to create a Malayalam font in Unicode format which could be used as a font for making titles in posters, banners etc. Though there exist many font in Malayalam, the absence of an ornamental font which is based to original script pattern is an issue in Malayalam computing. The availability of such an ornamental font which suites as a title font for the fonts which follows the standards of SMC such as Rachana, Suruma etc will help the original script based computing to attain more publicity and usage. And Ardram is such an experiment.
As per the studies from my side along with suggestions from Hussian KH, who is the mentor of my project and a known font designer, an ornamental Malayalam font requires 514 basic malayalam glyphs, 32 special symbols and 10 indo-arabic digits. There is also a suggestion to make the English alphabets following the same style of calligraphy to be available with the font set which would make the usage of the font more simple. Hence English alphabets are considered as the secondary requirement of the font project as the aim of project is to create a Malayalam font. The Malayalam numeral glyphs are removed from the beta font set since the availability of the Malayalam numerals is not considered as a requirement in an ornamental font. Hence as per the survey the Ardram font beta will contain 556 glyphs. [514 Malayalam glyphs, 10 indo-arabic numerals, 32 special symbols].
Of the 514 glyphs for Malayalam basic font, 217 of them has to be designed uniquely for attaining quality calligraphy pattern where as the balance 297 can be created by modification and combination of the uniquely designed set. The 10 indo-arabic numbers and 26 special symbols are also to be designed uniquely.
The designing and conversion of design images to glyph of the basic 253 glyphs[217 designed glyphs, 26 special characters, 10 numerals] is on progress under the support of Ravi of Sangamithra, Kochi and pre-alpha version of the font containing 259 glyphs [217 designed glyphs, 32 special characters, 10 numerals] will be completed by the end of this month and the alpha font containing the whole 556 characters will be released by 20th of August. The beta will be released by 30th of August considering the suggestions that I receive from the alpha font which will result on the completion of my project that is submitted to Google Summer of Code.
The beta version will have a life cycles of 3 months and the ML_Ardram_SMC.OTF stable version will be released on Dec 1st considering the suggestions and ideas from the others under the GNU GPL V3 license, copyrighted to SMC, myself, Hussian KH and Ravi Sangamithra. The stable version will also contain the 62 English glyphs and hence the total number of glyphs in the stable release will be 608 [556 glyphs in beta and 52 English glyphs]. A "HOW TO for Malayalam ornamental font creation under SMC standard" which is suggested by Anivar on the last sprint will be published on FCI wiki by this time of stable release.
