Adding Typefaces to Render Beautiful Malayalam Ligatures

This site renders Malayalam text across several pages: proverbs, facts, observations, and transliterated content. For a while it used a single typeface. Now there are seven to choose from.

Six of them (Ezhuthu, Ala, Indira, Kutty, Lasya, and Thaara) are from the Rachana Institute of Typography, a Kerala-based organisation that has been building high-quality open Malayalam typefaces for years. The seventh is Manjari, also originally from Rachana but distributed through Google Fonts.

How to switch

Press C to open the console, then:

• ml-font list to see all available fonts and which one is currently active
• ml-font set <font_name> to set a font directly, for example ml-font set lasya
• ml-font pick to open an interactive picker that previews each font live on the page as you hover

Ezhuthu is the default.

Font previews

The passage below is from a piece by KGS on Pablo Neruda's Canto General. Click any tab to see it rendered in that typeface.

Notes on sizing

Some of these typefaces render small relative to the surrounding Latin text. To compensate, a few are scaled up using the size-adjust property in their font definition: Ezhuthu, Indira, and Lasya at 150%; Kutty and Thaara at 120%. Ala and Manjari render at their natural size.

All six RIT typefaces are released under open licenses. The full collection is at rachana.org.in.