[Indic-computing-users] Bangla...some other views

[FN <fr...@by...>]

Taneem Ahmed <ta...@ey...> in a personal email dated January 25, 2003
says his team's goal is "to support Bengali at X server's application level".
This solution could benefit speakers of the Bangla language both in India
and Bangladesh. (Bangla, or Bengali, is the fifth-largest language in the
world, with a total of some 207 million speakers -- ahead of Portuguese, and
behind Spanish.)

"The only difference I see between our group and most of the other groups is
that we are following the mainstream development, and we use what is
available (or will be available soon) to support Bengali. We want people to
be able to install any Linux distro of their choice, and use Bengali on it
with out recompiling anything," says Ahmed. 

He contrasts this with the Indix project, which he says has done an "amazing
job" which he greatly appreciates. But, he argues: "However, how many
average user would actually download the modified X server, gtk, etc.
libraries and recompile them? Also users will be limited to library version
provided by Indix, and every day we are seeing new programs using newer
versions of these libraries."

Ahmed says they have focused their development efforts to create programs
for end users, for example a transliteration program 'Lekho' based on QT, a
Bengali spell checker program bspeller based on aspell and gtk, or a hack
version of xdiary called xponjika which a Bengali calendar with a daily
diary. 

"I should mention that Lekho is actually a multi-platform program and it can
produce html or latex files and has limited spell checking capability.
Bspeller is a light weight text editor with aspell's powerful spell checking
and suggestion capability. It is also capable of printing/generating ps
files using Open Type fonts, a feature missing in even all the main stream
text editors," says he. 

Free Bangla Font, a sister project of bengalinux.org, has created Open Type
Bangla fonts (four differect font faces by early 2003). Currently they have
started doing the GNOME translation, and their own web site. "One of our
more ambitious project is a Bengali dictionary project. Under the documents
section we also have few mini-howtos about how to setup a Linux box for
Bengali," says Ahmed.

Ahmed says they are also trying to work out an understanding with BornoSoft,
to help create a Bengali XIM for GNU/Linux using BornoSoft's writing scheme,
which would then be made free for Linux. "Personally I think this would be a
great step towards using Bengali in Linux, but we will see what happens,"
says Ahmed with cautious optimism. 

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Frederick Noronha * Freelance Journalist * Goa * India 832.409490 / 409783
Writing with a difference... on what makes *the* difference