Just some background on fonts in Kannada

Kannada (ISO language code - kn) is widely spoken language in Karnataka. Even though we are the IT hub of India advancement of Kannada in computers is very very less. But there was some effort from some of the Open source community to make Kannada language usage in computers more and more user friendly. Of those efforts to provide a Unicode font to Kannada one was taken up by IISC Bangalore which gave to fonts Kedage and Malige to us but because of some controversies (which I really don't know clearly) they just GPLed both fonts and walked away. On the other hand Red Hat is maintaining Lohit font family and provided us most bug free Lohit Kannada. But most of the Linux geeks are not happy with appearence of Lohit Kannada so every one  is happy to use Kedage besides of many bugs.

As I was restructuring the ttf-indic-fonts for Debian I was looking at the bugs reported against the package and I came across the bugs reported against Kedage and I asked my friend Aravinda if he can fix them and maintain the font. He readily agreed and fixed the bugs in both Kedage and Malige and created repo of both on github. Since maintaining the Kedage and Malige itself is not possible because we don't have any consent from upstream finally he decided to call that a fork and now Kedage => Gubbi and Malige => Navilu both fonts are now licensed under Open Font License 1.1 (OFL) and is available in Github [1] [2].

Gubbi -  Old Kedage with new bug fixes and rendering issues fixed
Navilu- Old Malige (Hand written fonts) with bug fixes and rendering issues fixed

I'm happy to announce that we now have a well maintained beautiful free fonts for Kannada and all thanks goes to Aravinda. And wait a bit more folks we have more to come :)