How to view Bengali (Bangla) Unicode Fonts

The preferred option to view Bengali should be Unicode 4.1 compliant Bengali OpenType Fonts (OTF). This is applicable for GNU Linux, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2000. Unfortunately Windows 9x and Win ME are not well supported. Microsoft has already announced end of support for Windows 9x and Windows ME. I am not familiar with Mac.

There are three good choices.

• Free Bengali Fonts from OmicronLab
• Ekushey Unicode Based Free OpenType Bangla Fonts
• The Free Bangla Fonts Project

If you want to install Bengali Fonts visit the following links

• GNU Linux
• Microsoft Windows

For Microsoft Windows, a simple approach is to use the automatic font installer with all open type free bangla fonts from OmicronLab. Note that the following fonts, which are not compliant with Unicode 4.1, are also installed.

• Akaash
• Mitra Mono
• Sagar
• Mukti narrow

One cannot write (type) in Bengali just by installing Bengali fonts. For writing in Bengali visit this link.

If the above information is not sufficient, then visit this excellent Bangla Unicode Setup Guide (for Windows 2000/XP) or Wikipedia.

Bangla Unicode Setup Guide provides detailed information on adding Bengali (Bangla) support in Internet Explorer and FireFox.

If you, still, cannot see Unicode Bangla (Bengali) based web sites, with IE, Firefox or Opera, then ensure that your browser’s encoding is Unicode (UTF-8).

Windows 98/ME is still being used. So for Windows 98/ME refer this link.

This blog has comments with useful information. I suggest that you read them.