|| On 24 Feb 2003 18:57:53 +0530
 || gnu@vsnl.net (Ramakrishnan M) wrote: 

 rm> BTW, Chapter 9 of the Unicode book, doesn't say about this
 rm> in the context of malayalam. But in the case of Devanagari,
 rm> it says that half-consonents "may be" encoded as 

 rm>  <consonent>+<halant>+<ZWJ> 

One way to handle "chillaksharam" (or half-consonants) is to input
the following.

<consonent>+<vowel U>+<halant>

The GNOME guys who do Malayalam support is going this way. I added
the support for this. Please find the patch.