About this document

This document hopes to be an up to date status description of the Bengali rendering capability of various operating systems and browsers.

Introduction

To represent Bengali text, this site uses the code-points defined by Unicode. This definition is at the character level, and thus Unicode text only represents a sequence of characters, not specifying how they should be rendered as glyphs. A particular renderer (Web Browser / Text Viewer) is free to display this text in any manner it wants. However, currently the most popular among technologies that attempt to do this systematically is Opentype. This page describes the current status of Opentype support on various platforms.

Windows

Under the Windows operating system, Internet Explorer uses the Uniscribe layout engine to render opentype features. Recent versions of Windows, e.g. Windows 2000 or XP, ship with the required version, and installing a recent version of Internet Explorer is usually sufficient for older versions (not NT, though, proabably).

The currently released versions don't `support' Bengali, according to Microsoft (support is expected in Windows 2003), though rendering works OK for the most part. However, window titles etc don't show Bengali at all.

As far as I know, system-level Bengali input support is currently non-existent. But I'm not very familiar with Windows, so I might be wrong; please let me know if you know otherwise. Third party input methods are discussed in another page.

Linux

On GNU/Linux, the Freetype library has already implemented (most of ?) the required Opentype Layout features. Renderers still need to do a lot of work (such as character reordering and appropriate feature lookups) to use this properly.

The Pango library is capable of using Freetype to display Bengali. Pango is used in GTK 2, so GTK 2 based programs (including GNOME 2) have good Bengali support. However, there are some fairly serious Bengali rendering bugs, which will probably not be fixed very soon. Also, Gecko based browsers don't use Pango's facilities, so they can't render Indic scripts properly (nor do they have any plans to fix this).

Openoffice (from version 1.1 onwards) has fairly good support for Opentype (comparable to Pango). It can render HTML pages, and has good printing and PDF exporting support. However, it has some of the same bugs as Pango, probably stemming from their common origin in ICU (I'm not entirely certain what that is). One small downside is that it doesn't use fontconfig, requiring the Opentype Bengali fonts to be installed in the old-fashioned way.

Trolltech's Qt library (on which KDE is based, has recently added support for Opentype (from version 3.2). This is an independent implementation. It has trouble with text selections, and PDF export is not as good as it could be.

KDE 3.2 ships with Qt 3.2 and using Konqueror is currently probably the easiest way to see Bengali Web content.

Independent implementations

Yudit is a text editor with an independent implementation of Opentype (not using Freetype, that is). It has been around for a fairly long time, and has the advantage that it works on almost all platforms with has no special software requirements. It has excellent input support as well. However, it doesn't blend in very well with other software.