Malini is a Malayalam variable typeface optimized for body text. Taking full advantage of variable font technology, it offers an unprecedented level of flexibility from a single font file with four axes: Weight, Width, Slant, and Optical Size.
As a variable font, Malini gives you fine‑grained control over each style, and it also ships with 16 predefined styles (named instances) that behave like regular static fonts in your font menu.
Download the latest fonts from the GitLab releases.
മാലിനി
wght): 100–900, default 400 — Thin to Black. Also controllable via CSS font-weight.slnt): 0 to −12, default 0 — Upright to slanted (about 12° clockwise).wdth): 75–125%, default 100 — Condensed to Expanded. Also controllable via CSS font-stretch.opsz): 10–48, default 12 — Adjusts contrast and spacing to suit the font size.Weight: For light text on dark backgrounds, 400 (“Regular”) is typically appropriate for text and code; for dark text on light backgrounds, consider 500 (“Medium”) for better color.
Slant: Malayalam doesn’t have an established italic tradition; use slant as a secondary way to emphasize or vary tone. A partial slant around −12 can be effective.
Width: Use moderate condensation/expansion (75–125%) to fit tight layouts, but be mindful of legibility.
Optical Size: Browsers automatically choose an appropriate opsz based on font-size.
To disable, set font-optical-sizing: none, or explicitly set opsz with font-variation-settings.
Use the variable font on webpages to get rich styles with a single file. Define ranges for weight, width, and slant in
@font-face, and fine‑tune with font-variation-settings where needed. Consider using CSS custom properties to
avoid inheritance pitfalls — see this article. For background,
see MDN’s Variable Fonts Guide.
Malini covers all Malayalam characters in Unicode 15 and includes Latin support. It supports approximately 294 languages, covering ~2.8B speakers (per hyperglot). This makes it suitable for multilingual typesetting that mixes Malayalam and Latin.
Malini is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
