KOCHI: Swanthantra Malayalam Computing, the free collective centre which is engaged in the development of free, open software in Malayalam language, has released a new version of Malayalam unicode font in the name of Uroob, as a tribute to the ruby jubilee of his famous novel ‘Ummachu’.
‘Ummachu’ is the novel written by P C Kuttikrishnan, popularly known by his penname Uroob and this is the first novel to have received the Kerala Sahitya Academy award, in 1958.
‘Ummachu’, first published in December 1954, is set to celebrate its 60th year of celebrations.
H K Hussain, the designer of the font who had already designed many fonts like Rachana, Meera and Keraleeyam, said the new font was developed with the financial support of International Centre for Open Source Software (ICFOSS), an autonomous organisation set up by the Government of Kerala. At present, 1.0 beta version of ‘Uroob’ is available and it is the expanded version of Keraleeyam font.
The ‘Uroob’ font can be download free from the link http://smc.org.in/fonts/ and the source code of this font is available inhttp://gitlab.com/smc/uroob.git. “It is our 10th unicode font and second font released this year.
‘Rachana bold’ was released in the last week of March,” said Anavir Aravind, executive committee member, Swanthantra Malayalam computing. Formation of ‘Uroob’ font helps rekindle the memories of the great Malayalam writer Kuttikrishnan.