[multikulti-tech] Not seeing font downloads as Bengali

[Dan McQuillan]

hi pete

thanks for the email & sorry for the delay in replying. 

>Message = I've used the link on your site to dowloaded a 
>FreeBanglaFont.zip. The thing is, these fonts open as plain 
>old English, there's not a Bengali Character to be seen; 

hmm. i don't know exactly what you mean by 'not a Bengali Character to be seen', but i am just looking at (for example) the likhan.ttf from the zip file in a font editor, and i can see lots of bengali characters...

>I'm trialling the Bangla Word software 
>for school use (we serve a Bangladeshi community in Hyde, 
>Cheshire) but this software comes with only a single font. 

that's interesting. as far as i can tell the bangla word package does not use the unicode encoding - i suspect it uses a proprietary encoding.  (i did try to contact banglasoftware i while ago to check this, but they never replied). 

this may be why you find no characters in the freebanglafonts ttf's, since the fonts are unicode based. 

i would recommend packages that are based on unicode encoding: this is a universal standard for font encoding that includes pretty much all of the world's living languages. See http://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html for more info. 

A lot of packages that were developed before the unicode gained wide acceptance were based on proprietary encodings. The big limitation of these encodings is that to see the text you need a font that uses *exactly* that proprietary encoding - the chances are a font for the same language, but from a different package, will not work!

The next release of Microsoft Word will supposedly support (unicode) bengali. 

>If you have any suggestions re other sources of TTF type fonts 
>that are supported by Bangla Word I'd appreciate it. 

The proprietary encoding they use may be the problem here. 

However, on the Bangla Word homepage it claims that it supports more that 200 fonts. Digging a bit deeper, their features page http://www.banglasoftware.com/features.asp suggests that Bangla Word can convert between different fonts - my guess is, that it has some routines to convert between different proprietary encodings. I've heard that the Bijoy software is widely used within the community, so if Bangla Word supports any external encoding it would probably be Bijoy. 

But i would recommend looking at unicode-based software, as this will also 'future-proof' the content you develop, and also make more standards-based web pages. 

>I can 
>find a lot of offerings for Linux but very little for PC's and 
>none of what I've downloaded so far will work with Bangla Word.

yes i've noticed that too. personally i'm heartened by it, because i think it demonstrates that open source / free software allows communities to develop software according to their own needs and not dependent on the marketing decisions of mutlinational corporates :-) 

But anyway, unicode compliant bengali packages i'm currently aware of that also run on Windows include: 
- Avro Keyboard: a free unicode compliant bangla keyboard knterface ror Windows http://www.omicronlab.com/avrokeyboard/
- Lekho: a "plain text" editor designed to take in phonetic input from a standard US keyboard and convert (transliterate) it online into bangla text http://lekho.sourceforge.net/

I am hoping to test these soon with our Bengali translator. If you try either of these packages i would be very keen to hear about your experiences!

hope this helps

dan mcquillan
[Dr. Dan McQuillan / Multikulti project / 020 7377 1226 / www.multikulti.org.uk ]