suruma

Many Malayalam letterforms take spiral shapes. Eg. 'ത' 'ര' 'ഞ' etc. The letter 'റ' can be considered as the basic unit or the building block of almost all Malayalam letterforms. The shape of 'റ' can be derived either from a circle or from a spiral. But from the general nature of curves that occur in most of the letterforms and the way they are hand-written, one can easily say that the shape of 'റ' is more closely associated with the spiral. Many calligraphic and ornamental styles in Malayalam stem from this property of letters. In fact, one can easily feel the spiral flow while writing some Malayalam letters like a 'തൃ' or a 'ശ്രീ' (by the traditional way, off course) on a level surface using a smooth stylus. Letter shapes of other dravidian languages also share this property.

Designing Malayalam letter shapes using spiral curves can be handy because it can give more faithful representation of the contours. It also provides great easiness while drawing such letter shapes when compared to bézier splines. The galaxy of spirals ranges from the simple logarithamic one to the more exotic varieties.

The spiro library(GPL'd) by Raph Levien makes use of clothoid spiral curves (aka Euler spirals) for drawing smooth curves and then converting them to bézier splines. Spiro is now incorporated in FreeSoftware like Fontforge and vector graphics editor Inkscape.

Try to attempt designing a Malayalam letter using bézier splines(quadratic or cubic) and clothoid splines. The result will be faster with latter and the satisfaction will be more, too. Getting the same result is tiresome if one starts with the former.