# Panmana - a body text Malayalam Unicode font #

This font is dedicated to renowned teacher, linguist and author Prof.
Panmana Ramachandran Nair.

Prof. Panmana Ramachandran Nair was a staunch supporter of Rachana’s
campaign for the lost characters from the very beginning in 1998. R.
Chitrajakumar, the leader of the campaign was his student at
University College, Thiruvananthapuram and it added his excitement to
participate in organizing the launching Rachana Seminar on July
7th, 1999 at the then VJT Hall. Many of those who opposed Rachana vehemently
were his close friends but the relationship didn’t draw him back from
criticizing their stance. He was one of the first persons who pointed out that
Rachana is a green technology that would make 10% less paper for
printing by making use of non-truncated conjuncts compared to
reformed script. His ardent stand and linguistic arguments were a great
inspiration to the campaign in the early years especially when academicians were
reluctant to support Rachana publicly. In 2018, a few months before his demise
he expressed a wish in a private talk to celebrate Rachana’s 20th birth year in
2019 to spread the success story of Rachana during the past two decades — a
wish that is not yet accomplished but a strong reminder to organize a
seminar in memory of him to compile and document the history, growth
and impact Rachana made in Malayalam language technology especially in
the Unicode era.

## License ##
Panmana is licensed under Open Font License 1.1

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

## 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.
