Openoffice.org in Bangla

The newly released OpenOffice.org 1.1 has support for rendering Devanagari and a few other Indic scripts. So, quite a few people have asked me - “What’s the status of Bangla?”. For a quick ‘n dirty answer, take a look here. For a long answer - read on….

Bangla support in OOo for GNU/Linux is buggy. To write Bangla properly in Writer you need to use a workaround, and Bangla is still not there in the other components. In this entry, I’ll try to explain how to write legible Bangla in OOo Writer. Please note that this is for *ix users only - if you use Windows 2k/XP, use this.

To begin with, verify that you have OpenOffice.org version 1.1 and download some Bangla fonts from the usual location. Un tar the fonts packages, and use the OOo admin program (spadmin) to install the fonts (select the *.ttf files) . Now fire up a terminal application, and issue the command

setxkbmap -symbols “us(pc105)+ben+group(ctrl_shift_toggle)”

Now, fire up OpenOffice.org Writer and from the fonts list, select any one of the Bangla fonts that you installed previously. From the side panel in Writer, click on the “Online Layout” button (usually it is the very last button from top). Now, press the right Ctrl+Shift key on your keyboard (together) and start writing Bangla in OpenOffice.org Writer. The keyboard layout is not phonetic (but once you get used to it - it is really fast!). You may want to take a look at this and this (shift mode) for getting familiar with the layout. And if you absolutely insist on a phonetic layout - see the keyboard section of the Bangla in GNU/Linux Howto. Here is a screenshot of what to expect.

..and if you want proper Bangla support in OpenOffice.org in the future, please vote for this bug in the OOo bugzilla.

Unicode? Whatz that??

Someone pointed out a very nice article on Unicode and related stuff. An ideal introduction to the subject for newbies.