മലയാളം/സഹായം

GNU/Linux

Fonts

These are the available Unicode Fonts.

There is an incompatibility between Anjali and Rachana when rendering "Chillu" (consonants without vowel sounds).

To setup the fonts just copy it to ~/.fonts directory or open nautilus file manager and go to location (press CTRL+L and type location) fonts:/// and drag-n-drop font files to this location. If you want it to be available to all users copy it to /usr/share/fonts. You can check whether the fonts are installed correctly by running the command fc-list (eg. fc-list |grep Rachana ). Restart the running applications so that the new fonts are available to them. All aplications which depend on font config will be able to use the newly installed fonts.

Rendering

KDE/QT offers best rendering support and GNOME/Pango rendering support is still not perfect. So you can use KDE tools for working with Malayalam (konqueror for browsing, kedit for text editing, koffice for office and kbabel for po file (gettext message bundle) editing.

(... Anyone know how to make this new fonts available for Open Office? ...)

... It seems Open Office recognises only ttf fonts and not otf fonts, so you can use ttf fonts (you can use fontforge to convert a otf font to ttf, if you need) --Pravs 06:12, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Input Methods

Inscript keyboard layout

Even though it might look a bit difficult to start it is the fastest input method. You can select malayalam keyboard layout from "keyboard" menu in GNOME Preferences section (in my Debain GNU/Linux etch it is Panel->Desktop->Preferences->Keyboard) or (...fill in for KDE here ...) in KDE

Inscript [Malayam Keyboard layout (I would suggest you take a printout of this picture, you won't need it for more than two days maximum though :) )

=Lalitha phonetic keyboard layout

For more details see this page.

SCIM

Phoentic Input Method- സ്വനമൊഴി

This input methods provides an easiest method to type Malayalam in Manglish. It comes with flexible keymapiings and typing suggestion features.

Visit സ്വനലേഖ for more details.

Mozhi Keymap

You can type in manglish as you do in varamozhi. Please follow these steps: 1. Install SCIM 1.2.2 or later.

   * for .deb files see here
   * for other SCIM downloads see here
   * install libscim, scm-gtk-module and scim-devel packages.

2. Install KMFL (keyman runtime) version 0.8 or later.

   * binaries are available as RPMs and DEBs in KMFL download page 
   * install kmflcomp, libkmfl, libkmflcomp, libkmfl-dev and scim-kmfl-imengine.

3. Download Keymap (tar.gz file)from here and extract it. Copy *.kmn to ~/.scim/kmfl & mozhi.bmp to ~/.scim/kmfl/icons (create these directories if it does not exist)

4. Restart SCIM (best option would be restarting X by pressing CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE)

5. Use CTRL + SPACE to active SCIM, select Mozhi Keymap from other keyboards section.

Microsoft Windows

See help page of Malayalam Wikipedia for help in setting up malayalam environment for Windows.