RIT fonts: supporting a range of applications

Rajeesh writes about recent enhancements to RIT fonts:

RIT has published a dozen open source Malayalam fonts so far, and till now they supported the version 2 of OpenType specification for Indic scripts (which is nearly 20 years old, as v1 spec was deprecated in 2005). Our fonts work accurately & perfectly in shaping Malayalam characters with two of the most widely used shaping engines — HarfBuzz and Windows Uniscribe.

But there are shaping engines and application softwares that do not adhere very well with the specification, either due to incomplete or buggy software implementations, such as Adobe Lipika world-ready composer. Owing to frequent user requests and anguish of having to see wrongly shaped Malayalam characters created by these applications, I have taken additional efforts to add basic support for the legacy/buggy shapers also.

Support for Kobo ebook reader was added first.


Support for Adobe Lipika shaper was also added, supporting InDesign versions 2021 and older.


Even Windows XP is supported.


These improvements are available with newest release of all RIT fonts, and should help to show Malayalam characters correctly shaped almost in every applications.
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