Nice film title treatment: Abhijan (The Expedition)

Love this! I haven't seen the film, but hooray again for Satyajit Ray!

Diacritical / vocalization marks and Arabic

I finally got around to reading the lovely diacritical mark article that our friend, Mr. David Březina wrote for i love typography! I don't know much about Arabic, but it definitely made me want to take another look at the decorative calligraphic work in which the *vocalization* marks are more obviously essential elements of the composition. After a very very quick Google search, I found this nice overview of the history of Arabic type evolution that looks promising. Hopefully it will help me dig further! Thank you, Pascal Zoghbi!

Cool cover illustration from Hindi-Telugu dictionary

I just thought this was particularly nifty. From Sri Kappa Ganthula Satyanarayana's Hindi-Telugu dictionary, hosted at Archive.org.

Google Books and Internet Archive: Indic script pdf books

Due to my horrible documentation practices, I had to search the online library catalogs to find the books I used for my flickr collection. Lo and behold, I stumbled upon .pdf excerpts (or even in some cases, entire books!) hosted by Google books and the Internet Archive!

I'm not sure how these were all scanned, if by man or machine, but hooray! (Yeesh, after working as a documenter/scanner in my college's media library for two years, I have an even deeper respect for the people who put the time and effort into projects like this! -- maybe I should honor them by making sure to properly cite things from now on. Sigh.)

So here you go, kiddos! A few fine examples!

A Kannada-English school dictionary, hosted by Internet Archive.
A Progressive Grammar of the Malayalam Language, at Google Books.
Sinhalese, self-taught, at Internet Archive.

I reccomend searching for other Indian languages and topics at Internet Archive - there is some good stuff!

Kannada and Malayalam images

Nothing too amazing to report today, but I'm going to try to get in the habit of more frequent posts, even if they are simple like this! Sound good, readers?

I've just added some dark, hastily taken photos of Kannada and Malayalam type and lettering from the few books I've been able to find on the subject during recent library visits. If you click on "all sizes", there are much larger - and hopefully slightly helpful - images. So there you go! :)