1. Introduction1.1. Preface One of the foremost things on many GNU/Linuxers' wishlist is better support for
their vernacular script on their favourite operating system. But Indic scripts are some of the
most difficult in the world to add support for, because of inherent complexities like the
existence of conjuncts (yuktakshars) and non-standard spellings. However, the Free/Libre/Open
Source community is not one that is easily daunted, and this document tries to outline the
process of setting up Bangla support in FLOSS applications. Moreover, it also
aims to be the "developers' guide" for new developers in the Bangla in GNU/Linux project.
1.2. Copyright Information Copyright (c) 2002-2003 Taneem Ahmed, Santanu Chatterjee, Progga,
Sayamindu Dasgupta. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections , with no
Front-Cover Texts , and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is located at
http://www.gnu.org/licences/fdl.html
.
1.3. Disclaimer All copyrights are held by their respective owners, unless specifically noted
otherwise. Use of a term in this document should not be regarded as affecting the validity of
any trademark or service mark. Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as endorsements. You are strongly recommended to take a backup of your system before major
installation and backups at regular intervals. 1.4. New Versions The latest version of this HOWTO will always be made available at the
www.Bengalinux.org site in a variety of formats.
1.5. Credits We are extremely grateful to all the developers/users involved in the Bangla in
GNU/Linux project, especially the people at Ankur
and at the Free Bangla Fonts project
. The XML-stuff has been done with the help of the template
written by Stein Gjoen,
Gregory Leblanc and
Greg Ferguson. 1.6. Feedback If you have any comments, criticisms, ideas, additions, corrections, questions then
please do mail them to <users@bengalinux.org> mailing list. We would be happy to
help you. 1.7. Conventions used in this documentWe have used a number of special formatting to indicate warning messages, commands,
filenames, computer outputs etc. They are listed below.
- Shell commands
bash$ ls - Notes
| NOTE |
- Cautions
| CAUTION |
- Information
| INFO |
- Warnings
| WARNING |
- Filename/Directory
/usr/src/linux/ - Applications
application - Computer Output
no such file or directory - Codes/scripts
- Large Computer Outputs
1.8. Purpose of this HOWTO This document explains how to setup and develop support for Bangla (or Bengali) in
a GNU/Linux systems. Bangla support in GNU/Linux is by no means complete, but, in modern
GNU/Linux distributions, you may be able to write in Bangla, send emails in Bangla, chat in
Bangla, save with Bangla filenames (UTF-8....), have some of your graphical
applications localized in Bangla, etc. Moreover, we have targeted to have the
GNOME core translated into Bangla by August 2003, so that it can be included
in the 2.4 release of GNOME. (Update- GNOME 2.4 is now out with partial support for Bangla)
| However, note that this documents deals with Bangla support in GNU/Linux in
GUI based applications only - we have no immediate plans for supporting
Bangla on the console. |
| Also note that the Bangla support that we speak of here is totally Unicode
compliant. We do not support any kind of proprietary/non-standard encoding. |
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