Metafont, MetaPost and Malayalam font
At the International TeX Users Group Conference 2023 (TUG23) in Bonn, Germany, I presented a talk about using Metafont (and its extension Metapost) to develop traditional orthography Malayalam fonts, on behalf of C.V. Radhakrishnan and K.H. Hussain, who were the co-developers and authors. And I forgot to post about it afterwards — as always, life gets in between.
In early 2022, CVR started toying with Metafont to create a few complicated letters of Malayalam script and he showed us a wonderful demonstration that piqued many of our interest. With the same code base, by adjusting the parameters, different variations of the glyphs can be generated, as seen in a screenshot of that demonstration: 16 variations of the same character ഴ generated from same Metafont source.
Hussain, quickly realizing that the characters could be programmatically assembled from a set of base/repeating components, collated an excellent list of basic shapes for Malayalam script.
I bought a copy of ‘The Metafontbook’ and started learning and experimenting. We found soon that Metafont, developed by Prof. Knuth in the late 1970’s, generates bitmap/raster output; but its extension MetaPost, developed by his Ph.D. student John Hobby, generates vector output (postscript) which is required for opentype fonts. We also found that ‘Metatype1’ developed by Bogusław Jackowski et al. has very useful macros and ideas.
We had a lot of fun programmatically generating the character components and assembling them, splicing them, sometimes cutting them short, and transforming them in all useful manner. I have developed a new set of tools to generate the font from the vector output (SVG files) generated by MetaPost, which is also used in later projects like Chingam font.
At the annual TUG conference 2023 in Bonn, Germany, I have presented our work, and we received good feedback. There were three presentations about Metafont itself at the conference. Among others, I also had the pleasure to meet Linus Romer who shared some ideas about designing variable width reph-shapes for Malayalam characters.
The video of the presentation is available in YouTube.
The article was published in the TUGboat conference proceedings (volume 44): https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-2/tb137radhakrishnan-malayalam.pdf
Postscript (no pun intended): after the conference, I visited some of my good friends in Belgium and Netherlands. En route, my backpack with passport, identity cards, laptop, a phone and money etc. was stolen at Liège. I can’t thank enough my friends at Belgium and back at home for their unbridled care, support and help, on the face of a terrible affliction. On the day before my return, the stolen backpack with everything except the money was found by the railway authorities and I was able to claim it just in time.
I made yet another visit to the magnificent Plantin–Moretus Museum (it holds the original Garamond types!), where I myself could ink and print a metal typeset block of sonnet by Christoph Plantijn in 1575, which now hangs at the office of a good friend.
