[Freebangfont-devel] Re: Likhan font

[Deepayan Sarkar]

Hi,

On Thursday 13 February 2003 04:51 pm, you wrote:
> Dear Deepayan,
>
> I am a graduate student at the University of Washington. In connection with
> my work for the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project [
> http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/ ] I have developed numerous
> transliteration and Kharosthi fonts [
> http://staff.washington.edu/asg/pages/fonts.html ]. More recently I have
> been developing input methods for Windows for use with these unicode fonts
> using Keyman [ http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/ ]. This afternoon I have
> adapted the Devanagari input method I developed [
> http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/downloads/Devanagari.exe ] to work with
> Bengali [see attached]. I don't know Bengali myself, but have been asked to
> look into Bengali computing systems for a friend.

That's great.

> As far as I know, the Likhan font that you developed is the only OpenType
> Unicode font for Bengali. 

This is not exactly true, several (initially independent) efforts are now 
available from what we call the 'Free Bangla Fonts' project

 http://www.nongnu.org/freebangfont/

I'm copying this reply to our mailing list, in case others are interested.

> I am interested in making this Bengali keyboard
> available from my website, and wonder if you would mind if I include your
> font in the installation package - with due credit to you of course. If you

Among the fonts you will find there (which are all GPL'd by the way, so you 
are welcome to use any of them), the one called Mukti uses professionally 
developed glyphs and is definitely the best-looking, so I would suggest you 
use that one.

In case you have trouble unpacking the fonts from their tar.gz format, they 
are also available from my website at 

http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/Bengali/WebPage/Font/


> like the keyboard input system, and also wish to make it available from
> your website, that would be fine with me too. Since I am not very familiar
> with Bengali, some of the keyboard mappings I chose, may not be optimal. If
> you have any suggestions on this, or other aspects of the keyboard, I'd be
> happy to make adjustments.

I'm afraid I might not be able to help you there. I very rarely work on 
Windows, so I won't have the time to do any testing (I'm also completely 
unfamiliar with Keyman). But there IS something that you might compare your 
input method to. I have an HTML page with some javascript that can be used 
for bengali input using any modern browser. It's at 

http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/Bengali/WebPage/BanglaInput.html

(it's very new, and is not yet fully documented, so ask me if you have any 
confusion). It's approximately based on the ITRANS 
(http://www.aczone.com/itrans/) input map.

In any case, I would be more than happy to link to your page from mine. Just 
let me know what you would like to have.

Deepayan