# RIT Rachana — traditional orthography opentype Unicode font for Malayalam #

RIT Rachana covers Unicode 13.0 base characters for Malayalam and entire glyph
set in the ‘definitive character set’ of Malayalam traditional orthography,
having more than 900 characters.

![Rachana specimen](tests/rachana-poster.png)


1. RIT-Rachana fully respects its historical role played by the Rachana
movement in resurrecting the original script of Malayalam. It completely
adheres to the definitive character set compiled by R. Chitrajakumar.

2. The font featuring (GSUB) of Rachana is completely revamped holding the
right spirit of definitive character set which replaced all previous
modifications

3. All the glyphs in Rachana have been redesigned.

4. Rachana Italic, bold and BoldItalic were also freshly designed and generated
respective font variants.



## License ##
RIT Rachana and its OpenType feature for Malayalam is licensed under Open Font License 1.1.

## Authors ##
Hussain KH (typography), Rajeesh KV (font engineering),
Rachana Institute of Typography (http://rachana.org.in).

The Latin alphabets are adapted from [TeX Gyre Schola](http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/schola)
font. Thanks to GUST for providing permission to use under libre license.


## Colophon ##
This font is an offspring of Rachana movement under the leadership of 
R. Chitrajakumar who founded Rachana Akshara Vedi in 1999. He devised the
‘definitive character set’ of Malayalam based on traditional script which is
the base of Rachana as well as this font.

The naming convention of glyphs (`k1` for `ക`, `k2` for `ഖ` etc.) is devised
by K.H. Hussain in 2005 to form a mnemonic way to represent conjuncts and its
components and to facilitate the coding of glyph substitution of conjuncts.