Rachana Institute of Typography
The Rachana Institute of Typogaphy (RIT) is a non-profit company that exists for two reasons:
- 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.
- to provide commercial support if required by an organization that want to use these free fonts for their commercial production.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Download Sundar
Here are the links to download the font, RIT-Sundar: