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Getting Malayalam Support in LyX (XeTeX/LaTeX)

posted on Mon, Mar 11 '19 under tag: how-to

How to type Malayalam in LaTeX using LyX

Last month I wrote about LyX requiring Malayalam language support. Joice went ahead and got it patched. Now it won’t be available for public use till the next release, but we can compile LyX from source and see how it works.

Requirements

The following has been tested on ArchLinux only. You will need a malayalam font installed. I’ve used Manjari for testing. You will also need various developer packages to compile lyx successfully. Read the README and INSTALL files in the lyx folder for knowing about these.

Compiling

git clone git://git.lyx.org/lyx
cd lyx
./autogen.sh
./configure
make

Running

./src/lyx

Getting Malayalam

• Create a new LyX document
• Insert Malayalam text into it
• Go to Document -> Settings -> Language and set Language to “Malayalam”
• Go to Document -> Settings -> LaTeX Preamble and insert \setmainfont[HyphenChar="00AD]{Manjari}¹
• Document -> View PDF

Here’s a video demonstration

Here is a preview document generated using LyX