Writing in Bengali

Phonetic input using Javascript

The following two webpages provide an implementation of phonetic input. They require only a web browser, and you don't need to download any other software.

Converter

This page lets you convert a chunk of romanized text into Bengali. This is useful if you wish to maintain the romanized version as the canonical source, and think of this step as "processing" the source into Bengali text.

See as you type

This provides a more WYSIWYG type approach where you convert one word at a time, and you can see each word in Bengali as you type it. This will be more useful if you wish to maintain your text in Bengali. This is usually the preferable option.

Both of these pages can be downloaded and saved on your computer, and subsequently used offline. Click on the "Don't Panic" button for help on usage. To save the output generated by these pages, you need to copy and paste it into another editor.

Background

Bengali unicode text consists of a sequence of characters, just like English text. The difference is that if you are writing using an ASCII keyboard, there is no standard mapping from the letters on your keyboard to the characters that you need to represent Bengali text.

There are two popular approaches for solving this problem. One is phonetic input, which means using the standard English keyboard to type `romanized' versions of the Bengali words one wants to write. For example, বাংলা could be typed in as `baaMlaa'. This can be thought of as a special case of methods which are not necessarily phonetic in the above sense, but are sophisticated enough to permit multiple-key sequences (multiple keystrokes map to a single character).

The other approach is to define a new keyboard layout, which for all intents and purposes replaces your English keyboard with a Bengali keyboard, with one key for all Bengali unicode codepoints. The choice of mapping is arbitrary, and may or may not have any relation to phonetically similar english keys.

Either of these two approaches may suit you better, you should try out both before deciding. Unfortunately, these two are not equally accessible. Changing the keyboard layout is easier to do at the system level, and most modern operating systems offer support for such input methods. This page offers you the less-easily-available option of phonetic input.