The Rachana LogoRachana

Rachana Institute of Typography

The Rachana Institute of Typogaphy (RIT) is a non-profit company that exists for two reasons:

  1. to make available good quality Unicode fonts in Malayalam and other Indic scripts under Open Font License so that the fonts can be freely downloaded and used without any restrictions by the user community.
  2. to provide commercial support if required by an organization that want to use these free fonts for their commercial production.
A series of fonts — both ornamental and textual — are proposed to be released in a timely fashion and the first in this series, viz., RIT-Sundar has been released on February 5, 2018 at River Valley Campus, Malayinkeezh, Trivandrum.

A new font, TN Joy, was released on October 2, 2019 as a tribute to the late social activist and revolutionary, TN Joy at Trichur. His first death anniversary fell on this day.

Ezhuthu—A handwriting font

A new font, Ezhuthu, that simulates the Malayalam handwriting, drawn by the famed calligrapher, Narayana Bhattathiri was released on November 1, 2020 which incidentally falls on the date of creation of the State of Kerala. The shapes are enchanting and has the mark of the artistic talents of its creator.

RIT-Rachana, the most stable version

A stable version of Rachana font, namely, RIT-Rachana (with all the variants like regular, italic, bold and bold italic) was also released along with Ezhuthu. The download links are given alongside. The rationale of the need for RIT-Rachana is also explained here.

Panmana—A body text font

A new font, Panmana, a body text font in serif category for Malayalam, was released on the new year day of 2021. This is in memory of Prof. Panmana Ramachandran Nair who steadfastly stood for the cause of Rachana Akshara Vedi.

Shaping issues in InDesign

Finally, Adobe has integrated HarfBuzz shaping engine (the libre software that correctly shapes many writing systems in GNU/Linux, Firefox, Chrome, XeTeX, LuaTeX, LibreOffice, Android, etc.) in their products. Instead of Adobe’s buggy ‘world ready composer’, it is possible to use HarfBuzz and get Malayalam properly shaped in InDesign etc.

To enable HarfBuzz in InDesign, follow these instructions.

Specimen pages

Please visit this page to see the new font, RIT-Rachana in action in both PDFs and web pages.

A specimen PDF created with Ezhuthu is available in this link.

A specimen PDF created with Panmana is available in this link.

Download Sundar

Here are the links to download the font, RIT-Sundar (സുന്ദർ):

  1. Opentype, Truetype, Webfont versions (otf, ttf, woff2)
  2. Font Source Repository

Download TN Joy

Here are the links to download the font, TN Joy:
  1. Opentype, Truetype, Webfont versions (otf, ttf, woff2)
  2. Font Source Repository
  3. Flyer (web version)
  4. Flyer (phone version)

Download Ezhuthu

Here are the links to download the font, Ezhuthu:
  1. Opentype, Truetype, Webfont versions (otf, ttf, woff2)
  2. Font Source Repository

Download Panmana

Here are the links to download the font, Panmana:
  1. Opentype, Truetype, Webfont versions (otf, ttf, woff2)
  2. Font Source Repository

Download RIT-Rachana

Here are the links to download the font, RIT-Rachana:
  1. Opentype, Truetype, Webfont versions (otf, ttf, woff2)
  2. Font Source Repository

Download Meera New

Here are the links to download the font, Meera New:
  1. Opentype, Truetype, Webfont versions (otf, ttf, woff2)
  2. Font Source Repository

Download Karuna

Here are the links to download the font, Karuna:
  1. Opentype, Truetype, Webfont versions (otf, ttf, woff2)
  2. Font Source Repository