so, as jean and andreas discussed in the bug tracker, the patch does solve a short term problem but is not a complete solution.
if you read a bit their comments in the bug tracker and try to read the code around the patch already proposed by andreas, you will already have an idea about how it works.
don't hesitate to ask for details... i might be able to help or can ask further...
(or somebody from the team might show up in here... or you might join also the irc channel for more interactive discussions)
just a side note: as far i can tell, for latin fonts it's very unusual to create condensed "text" by changing the width of the letters... you normally use a condensed variation of the font... and if you just try condense a font by 20%, you don't get a good result. of course, i cannot judge how good the result is for the noto / malayalm font.