Malayalam character picker

Reference material:

Quick start

(You must have JavaScript enabled.) Choose a view (see below). Click on characters/shapes to insert text into the output field or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field).

Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the tabs to get further information about the characters. You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow box to set preferences or search (regular expressions allowed - for example, to find the letter GA, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).

 

About the chart

Includes all the characters in the Unicode Malayalam block as of Unicode 5.1 (ie. including chillu characters). Consonants are in a traditional Indian articulatory arrangement, vowels aligned with vowel signs, and digits in keypad order. Additional consonants are listed next to the main consonant block. Useful combining characters, punctuation, etc. are below the digits. Top right are other symbols. The virama is at the bottom right of the consonant block. Hinting is currently NOT implemented for visually similar glyphs.

Transcribe This tab will convert transliterated text (see below) to Malayalam characters, automatically, and add the result to the end of the text in the output area. By default, all the text in the output area is converted, but you can also select a range of characters for conversion by just highlighting them with the mouse.

Alternative views are available. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet, shape, transcript or fontgrid.

Alphabet This view is likely to be more useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Malayalam. Consonants are in a modified Indian articulatory arrangement, to the left. To their right are all the other characters. Independent vowels are at the top. Below these are the vowel signs and combining characters. The line below the combining characters contains the chandrakkala and punctuation. The bottom lines contain numbers 0-9 and related symbols.

Click on the 'Advanced' arrow top right for less often used characters.

Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. In addition to single characters, it includes groups of characters that interact to form new shapes. This is not an exhaustive list of shapes in Malayalam writing, but may help locate most ligatures and conjuncts you don't recognise.

Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity. The orange shapes to the left of a group of characters indicate the left-most part of a character shape; characters and combinations that start with that shape are arranged at that location. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other. The orange rectangles at the bottom right indicate a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.

Where the shape of the characters involved in a cluster doesn't really change, eg. when subscripts are used, I don't usually list the combination here. You should search for the two shapes and add a chandrakkala (virama) between them.

Transcript I use this for typing in text for which I have a transliteration, or for creating phonemic transcriptions.

The consonant characters used for transliteration are arranged in groups, similarly to where that character would typically appear in a standard IPA chart. (So, for example, if 'zh' were actually pronounced 'p', you would look for it under the fricatives, not the plosives.) The large characters represent the transcription used by ISO 15919 (following the main table here, except that doubled RA is transcribed as ṯṯ), and the small Latin letters on white background indicate the actual phonemic pronunciation.

You can use the transcription letters to find a Malayalam character and add it to the output area, or you can click directly on the transcription letter to produce a transliteration. Having a established a transliteration (using the letters on the grey background), you can automatically generate the corresponding Malayalam characters using the Transcribe command.

For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.

While you click on Malayalam characters in the Transcript view, the picker automatically records in a buffer the associated phonemic character to the left of each character you click on. Clicking on this icon will dump those characters into the output area at the current cursor position, and clear the buffer. It is quite basic (for example, it doesn't take into account use of the delete key), but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Malayalam characters and the phonemic transcription.

Hyphens are provided for the inherent vowel sounds to help produce these transcriptions. They produce no output in Malayalam script, but the phonemic value is stored in the buffer.

Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).

Useful URIs

Instructions for use

Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: David McCreedy, Alan Wood

Other pickers

Introduction to Malayalam (my rough notes)

Malayalam in UniView

If something is missing

... let me know.