TWIFcomp

There are a number of products available, both free and commercial, which can produce Bangla text output on a variety of computer systems. These programs range from simple "notepad" editors to full-blown word processors and multilanguage program suites. I have made a distinction between those products which support unicode encoding and those that do not. Unicode is a worldwide standard for representing text, and is already widely implemented.

I am listing only fonts that are unicode-compliant. These can be divided into proprietary, free, and shareware categories. The free fonts have been made publically available, usually under a "copy left" license like the GPL. A number of them have been collected by the Free Bangla Fonts Project.

In other articles, I have discussed how to make a web page in Bangla and what resources (editing software and fonts) exist to write in Bangla. Hopefully, Bangla web pages will begin to spring up as the tools become disseminated and easier to use. So, how do you view a Bangla web page?

The first question is one of standards -- most specifically, the encoding type and font used by the web page. The good news is that an up and coming standard, unicode, will work for any language and that obtaining unicode fonts is not difficult.

I wrote this page to summarize what I learned in a couple of days of crawling around the web, trying to figure out the best way to represent Bangla on a webpage. Most webpages produced in Bangla are composed of static images, and not text. "Live" content often consists of recently (or in exceptional cases, dynamically generated) pdf files. This is particularly true of newspapers and other print-media sites (see, for example, these periodicals).