Bengali Writer Utilities
Are you a Bengali? Yes? Then you will get something interesting here. This page refers to a set of utilities for writing Bengali text.
The Web interface
| This is a utility that converts a text written in Roman to a text in Bengali. The program puts images one after another corresponding to the desired letters. The output can be viewed in any web browser. Files can be printed after saving them in PostScript. The current documentation is insufficient. |
A tutorialDownload |
The TeX interface
| BWTI is a package for writing Bengali text using TeX or LaTeX. It consists of METAFONT files for the definition of the Bengali alphabet and a style file for transliterating English texts to the Bengali format. The current version of BWTI is 3.0. |
Download |
X11 Bitmap Fonts
| The bengali font in the X11 bitmap distribution format (BDF). These fonts can be used for X11 windows applications. Browsers capable of loading user-defined fonts (for example, Netscape 3.0 onwards) can display html files in Bengali using these fonts. |
More infoDownload |
PostScript Fonts
| The bengali font as PostScript Type 1 font (gsf format). These fonts can be used for printing Bengali text in a PostScript printer. The PostScript previewer (ghostscript) allows conversion of these files to printer files for a wide range of printers. |
More infoDownload |
bn2html
| Another converter from text to html. It essentially provides a transliteration scheme for converting romanized Bengali text. In conjunction with the X11 fonts, the output html files can be viewed in a browser capable of loading user-defined fonts. |
More infoDownload |
bwedit
| An experimental Bengali text editor. Requires X11 fonts. Runs on any X11 window system having the Tcl/Tk shell wish. Allows conversion of Bengali text files to html, LaTeX and PostScript. Also provides an on-line transliterator for converting roman text to Bengali. Limited text-processing capabilities have also been added. An interface for sending bengali documents through e-mail is also provided. |
More infoDownloadUser's manual (in PostScript) |
bwsort
| A program for sorting Bengali text files written according to the BW font encoding. It reads multiple text files and sorts the concatenated list linewise. Supports interactive mode. |
More infoDownload |
bnbanner
| Utility for displaying large Bengali banners in a text-only terminal. Supports banners of five different sizes. Provides a transliteration scheme for inputting text in 7-bit ASCII. |
More infoDownload |
Compatibilty of different versions
Please note that the font files have changed from version to version. You may get bizarre results, if you use two packages with incompatible font files. Here goes a list of compatible versions of Bengali fonts that you can download from this page.| Web interface | TeX interface | X11 fonts | PS fonts | bn2html | bwedit | bwsort | bnbanner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Independent application | Version 1.0 | Independent application | |||||
| Version 2.1 | Version 1.0 | Version 1.0 | Version 1.0 | Versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 | |||
| Version 3.0 | Version 1.1 | Version 1.1 | No longer supported | Versions 1.4, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 | Version 1.0 |
A blank entry in the above table indicates that the compatible version of the corresponding package is not available.
The character encoding is the same for all the packages in the last row. The TeX encoding was different from the X11 and PS encodings for previous versions.
Finally here are the dependency relationships among the BW components.
| Component | Depends on |
|---|---|
| Web interface | Independent |
| TeX interface | Independent |
| X11 fonts | Independent |
| PS fonts | Independent |
| bn2html | X11 fonts |
| bwedit | TeX interface, X11 fonts, PS fonts |
| bwsort | Independednt but assumes the encoding of TeX interface, X11 fonts, PS fonts |
| bnbanner | Independent |
Thus if you want to upgrade bwedit to version 1.4, you should have version 3.0 of the TeX interface, version 1.1 of the X11 fonts and version 1.1 of the PS fonts installed in your machine. Note that bn2html is no longer supported, but the old version continues to work with the new X11 font files. On the other hand, bwsort works with older X11 and PS files, but not with the older versions of the TeX interface.
Get your own Free Home Page