That's effectively the only way to write several indian language with unicode - ZWJ + NZWJ and a decent font which supports all the ligatures.
The recent Bullshit Sans font is a clear example to describe how ligatures works. And for Malayalam there are consonant patterns which do not match itself to the Sanskrit model which makes it rather odd to write half-consonants which are full syllables (വ്യഞ്ജനം +് zwj).
And my name is written with one of those (ഗോപാൽ) & I can't say I'm mad about it because I found Unicode to be elegant in another way.
Somewhere in the early 2000s, I was amazed to find out that the Unicode layouts for Malayalam as bytes in UTF-8 were sortable as-is.
As a programmer, I found that detail of encoding to sort order to be very fascinating as it meant that I had to do nothing to handle Malayalam text in my programs - the collation order is implicit, provided everyone reads the ZWJ and NZWJ in their sorting orders.
The recent Bullshit Sans font is a clear example to describe how ligatures works. And for Malayalam there are consonant patterns which do not match itself to the Sanskrit model which makes it rather odd to write half-consonants which are full syllables (വ്യഞ്ജനം +് zwj).
And my name is written with one of those (ഗോപാൽ) & I can't say I'm mad about it because I found Unicode to be elegant in another way.
Somewhere in the early 2000s, I was amazed to find out that the Unicode layouts for Malayalam as bytes in UTF-8 were sortable as-is.
As a programmer, I found that detail of encoding to sort order to be very fascinating as it meant that I had to do nothing to handle Malayalam text in my programs - the collation order is implicit, provided everyone reads the ZWJ and NZWJ in their sorting orders.