Bengali Opentype Font
You need a Unicode font with Bengali glyphs to properly view the Bengali content here. Your operating system most likely does not come with any such font, but you can get some from the Free Bangla Font Project, which is also a part of Ankur. This page provides a few of these fonts for download as Opentype font files.
Any other font should work as well, but it is recommended that you install these since we have used these for testing.
Note: The OTF version of Likhan is smaller and has cubic outlines, but may not work on older versions of Windows. It also doesn't work with pango, but does work with Qt. If in doubt, choose the TTF version (last updated February 21, 2004).
These fonts are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The spirit of this license is approximately this: you are free to use and modify this font in any manner you want. You are also free to redistribute the original and any modifications to whomever you want, with the proviso that you do so under exactly the same licensing terms. Read the actual license for more precise details.
Note: The fonts we currently have are not of particularly high quality. If you think you can contribute to the effort with expertise and/or high quality glyphs, please contact us via our mailing list
Here are some other places you could get fonts from:
The latter includes an executable font installer that may be convenient for Windows users.
Windows Installation
There is more than one way to install these fonts, one of them is described below. (If you are a Windows user and don't know how to install a font, you will probably be confused by any more :-P )
Right click on the font links, and choose 'Save Target As' to download the fonts. Save the TTF files onto your Desktop. Next, click on the Start button, and choose 'Control Panel' in the menu that pops up. Somewhere in the window that comes up, you should find a folder named Fonts. Choose and open that folder.
To install the fonts, you basically have to copy them into this Fonts folder. To do this, you can now drag the TTF files from your Desktop into the Fonts folder. Equivalently, you can right click on the fonts on your Desktop, choose 'Copy' from the context menu, right click in an empty space inside the Font folder window, and choose 'Paste' from the context menu. You should see a dialog box pop up with two progress bars, and if it goes away after a while without any error messages, the font should have been installed.
Note that this step will fail if you already have a font with the same name installed (for example, an older version of the same font). In that case, you will have to first remove that font from the Fonts folder. To do this, identify the relevant font in the Fonts folder, right click on it, and choose 'Delete'. A dialog will probably pop up asking you if you REALLY want to delete the font. You have to click on the button that says 'Yes'. If you successfully navigate through this step, trying to install the font again should now succeed.
You should also turn on the 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' option in the Desktop Properties settings, which improves the legibility of the fonts considerably.
Note that you may additionally need to inform IE that it should use Likhan (or whatever font you choose) by default to display Bengali text. To do this, use the IE menu to choose Tools -> Internet Options -> Fonts. There, for language Bengali, you should select the appropriate font.
GNU/Linux and other Unix variants
You need to be running a system with a truetype font renderer
(most likely Freetype). If you
have fontconfig (you should
consider upgrading if you don't), you need to copy the fonts over to
the system Truetype font folder (or for a personal installation
~/.fonts/) and run fc-cache. Otherwise, consult your
system documentation (or ask on our mailing list). These fonts
can be used with Yudit as
well. Check the Free
Bangla Fonts site, these fonts may already have been packaged for
your distribution.