സ്വതന്ത്രമലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിന്റെ വാർഷിക പൊതുയോഗം ഈ മാസം 2024 സെപ്റ്റംബർ 29, ഞായർ ഉച്ചതിരിഞ്ഞ് 3 മണിമുതൽ 5 മണിവരെ, പിജി സെന്ററിൽ (Centre for Post Graduate Studies, വടക്കേ സ്റ്റാന്റിനടുത്ത്, തൃശ്ശൂർ) വച്ച് നടക്കാൻ തീരുമാനിച്ച വിവരം ഏവരെയും അറിയിക്കുന്നു. വിശ്വസ്തതയോടെ, സ്വതന്ത്രമലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങിനു വേണ്ടി. ഋഷികേശ് കെ.ബി ([email protected] ) മനോജ് കരിങ്ങാമഠത്തിൽ (9495513874)

August 2024 was month filled with activities. We have had lot FOSS events, meetups and  software releases. DebConf 2024 DebConf 2024 happened from July 28-August 4. Subin Siby gave a talk on Varnam Project : Learnings from creating an input method for GNU/Linux from a product perspective . The talk is available here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Santhosh Thottingal to attend  /gʁafematik/ 2024 Santhosh Thottingal will be presenting his work “Parametric type design in the era of variable and color fonts" at G21C (Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, also called /gʁafematik/), Venice, Italy durimg October 2024. Read more on the design process here . He will be presenting his design experiments using METAPOST for Nupuram [https://smc.org.in/font

Tributes to Dr. V. Sasikumar Swathanthra Malayalam Computing mourns the demise of Dr. V. Sasikumar, a free software activist and science writer. Dr SasikumarBlog post: https://blog.smc.org.in/obitury-dr-sasikumar/ Dr Sasikumar was a pioneer in the free software movement in Kerala. His friends fondly called him 'Kerala Stallman'. He was a scientist at the National Center for Earth Science Studies. His research topics were related to the lightning and sea coast of Kerala

സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയർ പ്രവർത്തകനും ശാസ്ത്ര എഴുത്തുകാരനും ഭൗമശാസ്ത്രജ്ഞനുമായ ഡോ. വി. ശശികുമാറിന്റെ നിര്യാണത്തിൽ സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് അനുശോചിക്കുന്നു. കേരളത്തിലെ തുടക്കക്കാല സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയർ ആശയപ്രചരണത്തിൽ നേതൃനിരയിലുണ്ടായിരുന്ന വ്യക്തിയായിരുന്നു ശശികുമാർ. സുഹൃത്തുക്കൾ അദ്ദേഹത്തെ സ്നേഹത്തോടെയും ആദരവോടെയും "കേരള സ്റ്റാൾമാൻ" എന്നുവിളിക്കുമായിരുന്നു. നാഷണൽ സെന്റർ ഫോര്‍ എര്‍ത്ത്‌ സയന്‍സില്‍ ശാസ്ത്രജ്ഞനായിരുന്നു. കേരളത്തിലെ ഇടിമിന്നലുകളെപ്പറ്റിയും സമുദ്രതീരത്തെപ്പറ്റിയും വിശദപഠനം

Launch of samam.net Samam.net is the online 4-language Dravidian dictionary (Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada). Its content  was compiled by the veteran Njattyela Sreedharan (ഞാറ്റ്യേല ശ്രീധരൻ) in a span of 25 years. SMC Members meeting Njattyela Sreedharan on Aug 11, 2022SMC is proud to have technically contributed to  its digitization efforts. Subin Siby has documented the process in detail in his blog post [https://subinsb.com/samam-malayalam-kannada-tamil-telugu-dic

Releases Introducing Indic Subtitler Indic subtitler landing pageIndic subtitler is an open source subtitle generator for Indic Languages. Supported by SeamlessM4T, faster-whisper, WhisperX and Vegam-Whisper which support almost 12 Indic languages by default. Read more about Indic Subtitler: https://indicsubtitler.in/about Announcing fontra.thottingal.in Fontra (https://fontra.xyz/) is an upcoming browser-based font editor from Google. It is not yet completely read

Poorna Inscript Keyboard LayoutIn our ongoing mission to improve Malayalam typing, we're proud to introduce Poorna Web, the web-based iteration of our Poorna keyboard layout. Poorna Web is designed to be a comprehensive solution for all your Malayalam typing needs. It brings the familiar Inscript and Remington layouts right to your browser, making it easier than ever to type all Malayalam letters. But Poorna Web is more than just a typing tool. It's a full-fledged text editor that caters to yo

payyans as a C library payyans, a tool to convert Malayalam/other languages written in ASCII encoding to Unicode has been ported to Go. You can find the source code and development here: https://github.com/smc/payyans-go. A web version of it is available at https://payyans.smc.org.in payyans was initially released in 2008 by Santhosh Thottingal and has helped in converting many documents written in ASCII Malayalam to

We're announcing the relaunch of our monthly newsletter starting January 2024. Stay tuned for updates on our ongoing projects, noteworthy developments in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Language Computing, and other engaging updates. Deccan Herald Changemaker 2024: Anivar Aravind Anivar Aravind has been recognized as the Changemaker for 2024 by Deccan Herald,  in the field of Digital Rights activities. This acknowledgment was for his commitment to creating

ആശയംബൈജു മുതുകാടന്‍ പ്രൊജക്‍റ്റ് കോര്‍ഡിനേഷന്‍ജയ്സെന്‍ നെടുമ്പാല ഡവലപ്പര്‍മുജീബ് റഹ്‌മാൻ ചെര്‍പ്പുളശ്ശേരി അക്കാദമിക്‍ സഹായംമഹേഷ് മംഗലാട്ടു് ലോഗോഹിരൺ വേണുഗോപാലൻ സാങ്കേതിക പിന്തുണസ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് സാമ്പത്തിക പിന്തുണമൈജി ആമുഖം ഇ

മലയാളലിപി പരിഷ്കരിക്കാനായി സർക്കാർ രൂപീകരിച്ച വിദഗ്ദ്ധസമിതിയുടെ നിർദ്ദേശങ്ങൾ അംഗീകരിച്ചെന്നും ഉ ചിഹ്നങ്ങൾ മാത്രം വിട്ടെഴുതുന്ന പഴയലിപി സമിതി നിർദ്ദേശിച്ചുവെന്നുമുള്ള വാർത്തകളുടെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തിൽ ചില പ്രതികരണങ്ങളും ചിന്തകളും പങ്കുവെയ്ക്കുന്നു. ഫോണ്ടുകളും ലിപിപരിഷ്കരണവും നിലവിൽ പേന/ബ്രഷ് കൊണ്ടല്ലാത്ത എല്ലാത്തരം അച്ചടിയും അക്ഷരങ്ങളുടെ ചിത്രീകരണവും നടക്കുന്നത് ഫോണ്ടുകൾ എന്ന സോഫ്റ്റ്‌‌വെയർ വഴിയാണ്. അതുകൊണ്ടുതന്നെ ഒരു ഭാഷയിലെ

Praveen Moves to High Court Against the New IT Rules Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, FOSS advocate and SMC member, with the assistance of SFLC moved to Kerala High Court challenging certain provisions of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. Statements are further explanations: * https://fsci.in/blog/fsci-challenges-intermediary-rules-2021/ * https://sflc.in/praveen-arimbrathodiyil-vs-union-india-sflcin-assists-challengi

This blog is on the controversial island formation stories near Kochi coast and the truth behind it. The island is just a visual artefact.

Manjari v2.0 Released A new version of popular Malayalam font - Manjari released. This version includes a few bug fixes and glyph additions. The new version can be downloaded from SMC Fonts . Read more about this release by designer Santhosh Thottingal on his blog post . New Version of mlmorph is Now Available Santhosh Thottingal released an update for Stuttgart Fini

Digital Literacy Program Inaugurated Inauguration of SMC's Digital Literacy Program was conducted on International Mother Language Day - 21st February. Famous Malayalam writer, N.S. Madhavan inaugurated the event and followed by a panel discussion consist of Dr.B. Ekbal, Bose Krishnamachary, Anwar Sadath, Mahesh Mangalattu, Santhosh Thottingal, Anivar Aravind and Sebin Jacob. For more details about the program, please visit the Community Portal [https://community.smc.org.in/c/digital-literacy/17

എന്റെ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിനു് എന്റെ ഭാഷ എന്ന മുദ്രാവാക്യത്തിന്‍കീഴില്‍ കഴിഞ്ഞ രണ്ടു് പതിറ്റാണ്ടുകളായി അന്താരാഷ്ട്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‍വെയര്‍ കൂട്ടായ്മകളോടും, കേരള സര്‍ക്കാറിനോടും, മലയാളികളോടും, മറ്റെല്ലാ തത്പരകക്ഷികളോടും ഒത്തൊരുമിച്ചു് പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുന്ന ഒരു സംഘടനയാണ് സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ്. സംസ്ഥാനത്തെ ഐടി@സ്കൂൾ പദ്ധതിയും നിർദ്ദിഷ്ട കെഫോൺ പദ്ധതിയും ഡിജിറ്റല്‍ മേഖലയിൽ വലിയൊരു കുതിച്ചുചാട്ടത്തിന് കളമൊരുക്കുകയാണ്. അനന്തമായ സാധ്യതകളുടെ വാതായനങ്ങൾ തുറന്നിടുന്ന ആധുനിക സാങ്കേതികവിദ്യയെ അറിയുന്നതിലൂടെയും പരിച

Mini DebConf Online India 2021 Debian India conducted Mini DebConf Online India 2021 from 23 to 24 January 2021. The conference featured various tracks in regional languages including Malayalam. Recorded videos of the session are available at: https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2021/MiniDebConf-India/. For more details, visit the website: https://in2021.mini.debconf.org/ SMC Community Portal The SMC community Portal is aimed at bringing all types of community discussions i

Localization Efforts VLC Projects  are 99% Localized Localized VLC websiteVarious VLC projects, including popular VLC Media Player, VideoLan website are almost finished localized into Malayalam. The translations are going on at Transifex . uBlock is Now Available in Malayalam Popular browser extension to block ads, trackers and malware sites - uBlock is now available in Mala

The year 2020 was in many ways a year of incremental updates. We pushed the envelope of knowledge a little, but in many directions. We continued to uphold our commitment to freedom of speech and democracy and stood with like minded organizations in support of causes that sought to better our society. The most impactful release of the year 2020 for general public was the new version of Indic keyboard, which came with several bug fixes and long standing feature requests included. This is the 6th

Govt. Stepped Back on 118A Malayalam OCR Santhosh Thottingal optimized OCR for Malayalam and released for public use . There were many attempts to build Malayalam OCR. Akshara OCR from SMC by Praveen Areembrathodiyil , Nayana by CDAC, Pottan OCR [https://github.com/harish2704/p

സുഹൃത്തുക്കളേ, സ്വതന്ത്രമലയാളംകമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങിന്റെ ഡിജിറ്റൽ സാക്ഷരതാ പദ്ധതിയ്ക്ക് ഈ ലോകമാതൃഭാഷാദിനത്തിൽ (ഫെബ്രുവരി 21ന്) വൈകുന്നേരം 4‌ മണിയ്ക്ക്  തുടക്കമാവുകയാണ്. Live Stream Link: Available at 4 PMനമ്മുടെ ജീവിതങ്ങളിൽ ഡിജിറ്റൽ സാങ്കേതികവിദ്യകളുടെ ഉപയോഗത്തിനു പ്രാധാന്യമേറി വരുന്ന കാലമാണ്. സാമ്പത്തിക ക്രയവിക്രയങ്ങളും വിദ്യാഭ്യാസവുമുൾപ്പെടെ നിരവധി പൗരാവകാശങ്ങൾക്ക്  അത്യാവശ്യ ഘടകമാകുന്ന രീതിയിൽ കോവിഡ് കാലഘട്ടം ഡിജിറ്റൽ സ്വീകാര്യതയുടെ വേഗതയും‌ വർദ്ധിപ്പിച്ചു. അർത്ഥപൂർണ്ണവും ഉത്തരവാദിത്തത്തോടുകൂടിയതുമാ

വ്യക്തിഗതമല്ലാത്ത ഏതു ഡാറ്റയും നോൺ-പേഴ്സണൽ ഡാറ്റ (എൻ.പി.ഡി) എന്ന ഗണത്തിൽപ്പെടുപെടുമെന്നാണ് ഇന്ത്യൻ ഗവണ്മെന്റിന്റെ നിർദ്ദേശിത നോൺ-പേഴ്സണൽ ഡാറ്റ ചട്ടക്കൂട് പറയുന്നത്.

Foreign Word Detection in mlmorph Python library for Malayalam morphological analyzer -mlmorph released version 1.2.2 with foreign-language word detection. It is tricky to identify words transliterated to Malayalam from a foreign language. Even though Pattern matching approach we employed to detect foreign-language words does not guarantee a 100% accuracy, new changes brought 12% increase in word coverage. mlmorph is capable of tagging 794924 out of 1402757 words and and their generative, aggl

> TL;DR Clarifying SMC's 15+ years of work in Rachana's 20 years of existence in the context of sustained misinformation. Further development of Rachana, Meera, Keraleeyam, Uroob and Meera Inimai fonts are on hold until the issues resolves amicably Swathanthra Malayalam Computing is a community organization that has been around since 2002, contributing to Malayalam language and its journey into the digital age through fonts and tools. We have spoken up on matters relating to freedom of speech a

The test corpus for Malayalam Morphological analysis has many foreign words. They are either written in a non-Malayalam script or written in Malayalam. For example, “ഇലക്ട്രിസിറ്റി”, “ഡോക്സ്”, “ഇന്റർമീഡിയറ്റ്”, “അബ്സ്ട്രാക്റ്റ്”, “ഇല്ലസ്ടേഷൻ”, “ഇല്ലിറ്ററേറ്റ്”, “റെക്കോർഡ്”, “procrastination”, “唐宸禹” - These are all foreign words and it is useless to analyse them using mlmorph. Since mlmorph works based on a root word lexicon, it is practically impossible to have them in lexicon. So there should b

SMC's statement in reference to the press release dated 21st October 2020, regarding the amendment to the Kerala Police Act, 2011

Malayalam English Machine Translation System Santhosh Thottingal released an experimental English-Malayalam translation tool. The system uses OPUS MT language models along with HuggingFace transformers . What is A Good Input Method? Santhosh Thottingal wrote a comprehensive analysis and comparison of input methods available for Malayalam. Improving Malayalam Handwriting

> Republished from Thottingal.in . As more and more people enter to the Malayalam digital world, the issue of not having any formal training for Malayalam computing is more observed. People sometimes just search for input methods in web, ask friends or use whatever coming with the devices they have. Since I myself is an author of two input methods, sometimes people ask me too. This essay is about the characteristics of a good input method

Indic Keyboard v3 released Indic Keyboard - popular input tool for Android devices, published its major release version V3 with new features and improvements. In this release, project lead - Jishnu Mohan, added long awaiting feature requests such as new language dictionaries, option to resize keyboard, toggle-able number row and several bug fixes. The new version  introduced a new logo designed by Hiran Venugopalan and a revamped website . More details ar

This post is originally published here My work, Quantitative Analysis of the Morphological Complexity of Malayalam Language is accepted for presentation at the 23rd International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue to be held from September 8-10, 2020. The conference proceedings is published by Springer and you can read the p

SMC announces the release of Malayalam Speech Corpus (MSC) . It is the repository of curated  speech samples collected using MSC web application . Speech samples are selected on the criteria that they have at least 3 positive reviews. MSC is a project launched by SMC to crowd source Malayalam speech samples from any contributor who can read out sentences and record them as speech sam

Manjari: 4th Anniversary & v1.810 Released Release event of ManjariPopular Malayalam Unicode font - Manjari, celebratedits fourth anniversary . Also, Santhosh Thottingal released Manjari v1.810. In this release, he added glyphs specified in Unicode 13.0. Designed and developed by Santhosh Thottingal and Kavya Manohar, Manjari was released on 23rd July  2016 in three variants - T

Last week Bezwada Wilson and Kalyani Menon-Sen sent a legal notice to Government of Kerala asking it to sever Aadhaar requirement from recently launched portal for civil registrations. We are releasing a joint statement supporting this action.

Announcing Indic Keyboard v3.0 with several new features and improvements.

New Web Interface for mlmorph Spellchecker! mlmorph Spellchecker web interface with editor.An updated web interface is now available for Malayalam Morphological Analyzer based Spellchecker. The web interface also features a rich text web editor with some Malayalam fonts preloaded. The source code is available at SMC GitLab repo . SMC and Indic Project Joins Global Encryption Coalition The Global Encryption Coalit

Last week Kalyani Menon Sen, a citizen, and petitioner in the Aadhaar case sent a legal notice to the Government of Kerala which has made Aadhaar mandatory for all state government jobs. We are issuing a joint statement supporting this action

SMC Featured on EdexLive & FSF Monthly Article about SMC on EdexLive print edition.Free Software Supporter - Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest featured the EdexLive article about SMC in it's June 2020 edition . TinkerHub Talks with SMC People Balasankar Talks about his FOSS journey.TinkerHub [h

New Look for SMC Website! SMC website now runs on a modernized tech stack. Latest redesign enables dark mode and makes the website localised and mobile friendly. New website is available on IPFS as well The website migration was carried out by Santhosh Thottingal, Jishnu Mohan, Aashik Salahudeen, Balasankar C and Joice Joseph.  Suggestions, improvements, comments are welcome. Blog Theme Updated! SMC Blog with latest theme.The blog itself has been updated to a new Ghos

സ്വതന്ത്രസോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയർ അധിഷ്ഠിതമായ തനതായ സാസ് സംവിധാനങ്ങൾ വലിയ തോതിൽ നിർമ്മിച്ചു സാങ്കേതികസ്വയംപര്യാപ്തത കൈവരിക്കാനുള്ള ഊർജിതമായ നടപടികളാണ് ഇനിയുണ്ടാകേണ്ടത്.

Indic-En Released: Firefox Extension for Indic Languages to Latin Script Conversion Using Indic-En extension in Hindi WikipediaIndic-En, a browser extension, which helps to read major Indic language text in English script  released. > I found lot of people struggling to read Malayalam because they don't know the script. I expect, this software will give more people access to local content - Subin Siby, Developer of Indic-En. This open source [https://gitlab.com/indicproject/indicjs/translitera

Manjari with Tabular numbers> This was originally written by Santhosh Thottingal and published at Thottingal.in . A new version of Manjari Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.800 adds tabular number and slashed zero opentype features along with bug fixes. New version of the font is available at: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#manjari Tabular numbers T

Chilanka used in palmleafs > This was originally written by Santhosh Thottingal and published at Thottingal.in . A new version of Chilanka Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.500 adds glyphs required to support International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration N

Gayathri's first anniversary, improved handwriting recognition algorithm, Indic Project website revamped and more Gayathri celebrated its first anniversary on 20th February 2020. Designer, Binoy Dominic shared his sheer happiness on witnessing the font he designed almost everywhere. The font was built by SMC with the support of Kerala Bhasha Institute. The unicode font was designed by Binoy Dominic, open type engineering was done by Kavy

Handwriting recognition in action. > This was originally written by Santhosh Thottingal and published at Thottingal.in . Many months back, I started an experiment to see if Malayalam handwriting recognition can be done in a non-machine learning based approach. This blog post explains the approach, the work done so far and results. Handwriting recognition [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

SMC at IndiaOS 2020 The first edition of open source conference IndiaOS held at Bengaluru on 18th of January. Anish Sheela, Anivar Aravind, Biswas, Mujeeb Rahman and Kailash Nadh took sessions. IndiaOS Grants Biswas got awarded IndiaOS grants along with Internet Freedom Foundation for initiating and leading Rescue Kerala project. Accepting the grant, Biswas commented, He will us

> This document was originally written by Kavya Manohar and published at kavyamanohar.com . The orthography (system for writing a language) of Malayalam is considered phonemic in nature. It means the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. But the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is not precisely on

KDE Translathons at Kochi and Thrissur KDE Community Kerala and SMC conducted two translathon s for KDE Malayalam localization. The first translathon was conducted on 14th December at AppIn Technologies, Kochi. Second one was at PG Centre, Thrissur on 22nd December. Subin Siby took initiative and lead the events. More photos and details of the participants

The biggest news in 2019 has to be Janayugom's move to Scribus - this is a landmark event since this is the first time an entirely free software based stack is used to produce a newspaper in Malayalam. The year 2019 saw a few significant software releases useful for end users - Gayathri font (SMC), TN Joy font (RIT), updated versions of Indic Keyboard and Chilanka/Meera fonts among them. There were also some significant computing tools released such as mlmorph and the speech corpus collection p

KDE Malayalam Localization moves to Weblate A new website is launched for Malayalam localization for the popular Gnu/Linux desktop project KDE. Based on Weblate , the website is available at https://kde.smc.org.in/.  Contributors can use email, Google or Github account to start contributing into KDE localizations. Further instructions and priority lists are available at SMC Wiki . Grafematik Conference Proceedings with paper by SMC