Gayathri Malayalam Typeface

A gentle and modern Malayalam display typeface. Available in three weights, Gayathri is best suited for headlines, posters, titles and captions. Unicode compliant and libre licensed.

• Design: Binoy Dominic
• Opentype engineering: Kavya Manohar
• Project coordination: Santhosh Thottingal

This project was financially supported by Kerala Bhasha Institute

Gayathri is part of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing projects' Malayalam typefaces

Gayathri has wide coverage of Malayalam orthography with a total of 1116 glyphs including basic latin and punctuations. It comes with three weights: Regular, Bold and Thin.

Release announcement: Malayalam, English

Building from source

1. Install the python libraries required for build script:

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt
   

2. Build the otf

   make
   

If you want to build ttf use make ttf. For webfonts, use make webfonts.

Testing

For testing use make test. You will require Font-Validator from https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/ for testing. Also hb-view from harfbuzz package.

Development

Following development workflow is used for this typeface

1. Designer produces SVG files with correct dimensions in the 2048em size. Commits to the repository
2. Typeface Engineers prepared a big configuration file containing svg file name to UFO glif mapping. See sources/design/config. It has left, right bearings, glyph width, base position in em canvas, unicode value and glyph name.
3. Typeface Engineers execute a script make ufo to prepare or update the UFO from the svgs.
   1. Make ufo first executes tools/import-svg-to-ufo.py to convert the svg to a UFO glif file. It uses the configuration for the svg defined in sources/design/config
   2. Make ufo then executes ufonormalizer to clean up the UFO and do various normalization
   3. Finally ufolint is executed to lint the UFO.
4. Typeface engineers construct the glyphs that use components(references) using a UFO editor like trufont
5. make otf Generates the OTF font
6. make test Generates a PDF with sample content for manual visual inspection.
7. Webfonts, TTF are also generated.
8. Gitlab CI pipeline executes make otf ttf webfonts and uploads the webfonts to a Gitlab pages so that a demo webpage is also prepared. From this pipeline results the generated font can also be downloaded.

Credits

See FONTLOG.md for details on contributions.

License

Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. https://scripts.sil.org/OFL