Santhosh Thottingal

Fontra has shaping debugger! This is super useful.

Thanks @fontra@typo.social

It is 2026 and terminal applications can't render complex scripts. As TUI applications are getting popularity, this is a significant limitation.

I looked in to the OSC 66 protocol in Kitty terminal and wrote a small tool that will make complex scripts like Malayalam render better in terminal.

Article: https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/03/22/complex-scripts-in-terminal/. It is now readable, but not optimal because of the discrete cells allocated for each glyph.

I wrote about Rust implementation of Raph Leviens two-parameter curve fitting,
and how I implemented a variable offset outline for the curves and made it interpolatable to use in typeface design.

https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/02/20/var-interpolatable-smooth-curves/

What does it take to get Large Language Models trained in low-resource languages? I analyse this problem from first principles, using my mother tongue, Malayalam, as a case study.

I trained a tokenizer and evaluated its performance against other tokenizers. I analysed the challenges that need to be solved to get a functional LLM. In other words, this is also a story of why LLMs work in languages like English.

The Broken Token: Tokenization for Malayalam Language Models
https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/02/27/malayalam-tokenizer-llm/

Published svg2glif - a Rust crate to convert SVG vector graphics into UFO (Unified Font Object) GLIF format, making it easy to incorporate SVG artwork into font development workflows. https://crates.io/crates/svg2glif/

I am migrating my python based type engineering workflow to rust (fontmake -> fontc) and this is one of the tool I need.

Happy 25th birthday, Wikipedia!

For web developers focused on speed, the Modern Font Stacks is an essential resource. It organizes system font CSS for the fastest possible rendering with zero layout shifts in all operating systems.

A small personal trivia point about the resource: My two typefaces, Manjari (under Rounded sans) and Chilanka (under Handwritten), are listed as the recommended Linux options.

Have you optimized your site with these system stacks yet?
https://modernfontstacks.com/

#typefacedesign #typography

An initial impact analysis of Wikimedia's self hosted machine translation service:

MinT supports 206 languages and 40,216 language pairs. Helped in increased translation numbers. Articles that were created using MinT have an low deletion rate. Became the second most utilized translation service in Wikipedia in just a short span of a few months.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/11/20/unlocking-the-worlds-languages-in-wikipedia-a-look-into-mints-impact-so-far/

I am participating in the International Calligraphy Festival of Kerala (ICFK) 2025
https://kachatathapa.com/
October 2-5 Kochi

wikipedia-article-transform - a cli tool and agentic skill to work with Wikipedia articles in token efficient way. Transform the html content into content focussed Markdown or plain text or structured json. Can save about 90% of tokens.

https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/03/14/wikipedia-article-transform/

Two new resources for natural language processing researchers and developers:

* wikisentences - A Rust-based tool for extracting sentence datasets from Wikipedia dumps in any language
* ml-wiki-sentences - A dataset of 2.25 million Malayalam sentences extracted from Wikipedia, now available on HuggingFace, prepared using the above tool.

https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/03/14/wikisentences/

How to identify and annotate sentences in an HTML page?

https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/03/07/html-sentence-segmentation/

Rust 1.91 added str::ceil_char_boundary and str::floor_char_boundary

Exactly the apis I needed for https://github.com/wikimedia/sentencex internals

Lighting up Diwali with Parametric Art - Watch drawing the Diya using Metapost.

(video is 4x speed)

If you are curious about the code and want to learn more about metapost, follow the link https://mpost.thottingal.in/m/jctdka2vnmwq4pj