You have reached the Ankur Archive Project, which aims to create an archive of public domain Bengali literature accessible through the internet. The concept is similar to that of Project Gutenberg. In fact, much of the content here will eventually find its way into the Gutenberg collection.

The contents of the archive are available from the Archive Page.

How to use this site

The Archive is designed to be viewed in an HTML browser, although you will also find plain text versions of all documents (see below).

The documents in the Archive are arranged in a hierarchical tree. Each directory, including the root directory, should have

• a file called archive.bn.html
• zero or more subdirectories
• zero or more documents

The archive.bn.html file in each directory should contain links to

• the archive.bn.html file in any subdirectories that might be present
• any documents in the current directory
• all directories above the current one (in the left panel)

Thus, if you start from the archive.html file in the root directory, you can follow links there to all subdirectories and documents.

If you have Javascript enabled on your browser, then clicking on the document links will open up the documents in a new window. It will also bring up a set of text fields on the old page which you can use to customize the font used to display the documents. (You should really use a single font, because the default fallback mechanism used by most browsers use different fonts for bengali characters and punctuations, which can make things look quite ugly.) The default stylesheet specifies a few known bengali fonts which will be used if available on your system. Please let us know if you want the name of a particular font to be added to this list.

Romanized version

All HTML files in the archive have `romanized versions', i.e., versions where the bengali unicode has been automatically converted to pseudo-phonetic Bengali written in the english (roman) script. These files have the last part of their name modified from bn.html to rb.html, and can also be accessed via links on the pages themselves.

XML and Plain text versions

The documents linked from the Archive Page are in HTML, which requires a web browser for proper viewing. An alternative (which may be more convenient on older systems) is to view the plain text (UTF-8) files (in Lekho, Gedit or Yudit). To do this, browse the root of the archive directly, and click on the appropriate .txt files in its subdirectories. You should configure your browser to automatically use an application suitable for such files.

Browsing this way is also recommended if you would like to look at the XML files (used to automatically generate the text and HTML versions), the scripts that generate the archive from the XML files, and to view incomplete (in progress) works.