| Creating Bangla Webpages |
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There has been growing interest in creating new or converting existing sites in Bangla. There are a few techniques involved. This article discusses them. As in creating webpage in English, one can use software tools like Frontpage or choose to write the basic html codes. However, such webpages are known to be what is called static. Dynamic webpages are produced by programs (mostly in PHP or ASP these days) that run on server. The output of such program is of course is a HTML file. The old way:
To create a webpage this way, you have to choose a Bengali font (and encoding of that font, as there is no agreed upon standard on that) and pick an editor that would allow typing Bengali characters. You may also need a program (often called keyboard mapper) to input Bengali characters. To be very specific, you may choose Sutonny font (from Ananda Computers), the Frontpage editor and Bijoy Keyboard manager. All these are very common in use. If you have any experience in writing English webpage, then you shouldn't have any problems in doing the same in Bengali. Now the question of enabling the end users or viewers view the texts you have written. The viewer MUST have the Bengali font you have used in writing the pages or a compatible one to see the pages. The font must be installed and functional on the operating system in use. In the event of not having the font, there are few things you can help viewers. 1. Host the font file on the webserver and ask the viewer to download and install it. It would require you have the appropriate permissions from the font vendor. Also, the viewer must have the privilege from the operating system of the computer in use to install a new font. This technique is well enough and in use on many websites. Apart from the adherence to IE the biggest problem of this technique is its inability to be meaningful to a search engine. If you have a website that Google does not know about, then do not expect many visitors to your website. Search engines would consider such webpages as English but wont be able to find any meaningful word or phrase to index on. Though you can have keywords in metadata, but search engine like Google tends to ignore or ill-consider them.
Bengali- the UNICODE wayTo write texts in UNICODE, you need a font that is UNICODE compliant (commonly called OTF though OTF can be non-UNICODE as well). The viewer also has to have some font that supports the UNICODE and has Bengali characters in it. The good thing is, both the fonts not necessarily have to be the same as long as they both conform to UNICODE and have Bengali characters in them. (An OTF font may contain characters of more than one language.) So the viewers are unlikely to have any problems in viewing Bengali pages as long as they have at least one Bengali OTF. The good news is, the Windows XP SP2 and later has Vrinda as one Bengali font. There may be similar things on Linux and other platforms (I don't have much knowledge about them.) To edit UNICODE texts (be it any language including Bangla) you would need a text editor (Notepad can do), or can go for full functional HTML editor like Frontpage. Frontapge/notepad would allow you enter texts in any language if your system is configured properly and has got a required font. Inputting character of non-English languages needs a keyboard mappers as usual. There are heaps of tools to choose from for this. The UNICODE website http://www.unicode.org/ lists the sources of such programs. For Bengali and Assamese, Avro (http://www.omicronlab.com/) seems the winner at the moment. Example and sources Here are a few examples of Bengali websites employing UNICODE.
The good thing that you may not know is that you can search on Google in Bengali. Get any of Bangla inputting software like Avro and type some Bangla texts in the search box. Hit the search button and then see. Pros and Cons of old and new ways Coming... |
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