This is horrible. This oldman's forgetfulness. I just discovered that I sent three emails to this thread from a wrong email id and hence none of them came up.
Let me paste all three here. Mail: 1 Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:07 PM > > Someone, who by sheer volume of Bengali output using Linux, vouches > Fedora 10 to have the most complete support for Bengali, could perhaps > say more ;) > Sankarshan You should not do this. You know this whole off-day I am spending with the Bangla Unicode wordlist that Sayamindu parsed out from my Bangla texts, and actually around hundred more pages to go before I sleep and I have started it around 9 AM. Anyway. The opinion of mine that you obliquely referred to is entirely correct. In fact I am a really big-time user of Bangla Unicode. Not just I write a lot of mails and my blog (ddts.randomink.org/blog/) in Bangla, a lot of other texts I regularly write in Unicode Bangla. I am using Unicode Bangla support on GNU-Linux from around six years back (or, it is five?) while I was using SuSE 6.x (Arijit Majumdar will be able to say specifically, if he is still a member of this list, because he actually gave me that CD). Then I went on using Unicode Bangla support with SuSE 8.x series, and then for a small period of time I used Ubuntu 6.x. Finally for a little less than three years I am using Fedora, first 7, then 8, and now 10. And for some time within I used Slackware too. On all GNU-Linux distributions, at least in all these four distro-s, Unicode Bangla support is very elaborately there. My experience with Fedora was the best, but it maybe due to the reason that I am not a technical person, I came into GNU-Linux around eight years back due to the security from virus, after a lot of my writing (spanning 29 days) was lost from one such attack. And it was our dear old t (Tathagata, "cogito ergo es") suggested me about doing that while he was taking part in a class on Postmodern Post-Marxist philosophy every Sunday evening in my place. (In a way, thank you Sankarshan, already feeling quite nostalgic ... you know what happens with talkative old teachers. And Indra, can you still remember the GLT meetings?) And then, I was devoured up by GNU-Linux, Oh my God, I even wrote a book on Linux, and till that time there was not adequate enough support in Linux for writing, at least not with all the formatting that one demands. Anyway, let me return to the question of writing in Bangla Unicode on Linux. When I came into Linux already I have written quite a few texts, Bangla and English, books and essays, using computers. And so, in a way, I was quite used to MS-Word, in adequately active ways like writing macros or editing and tweaking them with the ready made VB IDE in-built to MS-Word. And then I changed over to GNU-Linux, and it will be more than a British understatement of the extreme order that I don't regret. These days I do so normally so many things with text that I never even thought of during those days. In SuSE and then Ubuntu I was having some minor glitch with the Bangla support, and so, finally I came to Fedora. Particularly from Fedora eight onwards the support gives no space to complain, and so they have actually taken away the pleasure of abusing that is so characteristic of a healthy Linux mailing list. Without abusing and all ... life seems quite boring ... at this age already so many livelier and pinker and greener preoccupations have gone away -- with them this one too. Any new user may take up any live Fedora 10 livecd (or better the XFCE spin of the live thing so efficiently done by Rahul Sundaram) and transfer the image to a flashdrive and boot. That will be a much better hands on thing than writing mails from old talkative teachers. If anyone does not have a system to create this can give me one USB stick with at least one GB and I can prepare it for him or her, then collect it from me in Jaipuria College near Shobhabajar Metro Station. Mail 2: Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:13 PM One postscript: These days I encounter a lot of fables around lack of conjoined letters (যুক্তাক্ষর) in the Linux distros. That are all very cheap lies of the third grade. I have more than 75K words typed in Bangla Unicode on my machine, and I am yet to get one. At one time r+j or a few things like that were a problem, but for around two years they are all things of past. I think Sayamindu can vouch for it too, and that too in a very unfortunate way. Whenever some thing would not work Sayamindu always got a phone call and then one ceaseless endless string of calls (full of abuse) ... and I think for quite some time he never got one from me -- I really miss it. Mail 3: Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 11:30 AM > For MSFT's support of Indian Languages, there is the Bhasha India > website/portal which can be trawled. But then again, I'd say that with > specific questions it would be easier to arrive at answers. > Dear Bhowmick or any other Would-be-User of Bangla support on Linux It is expected that no user would ever have problem in any of these distros about using Bangla, or for that matter any Indic support. But still if you have any specific question or any specific problem, you can always write mails here on this list. And this applies to the Fedora 10 too. Like many other on this list, I have both the live CD/USB image or the DVD image in my backup and so I can very easily write one for you. The Bangla support is by default and automatic. You have to do nothing. One or two tidbits maybe, like for getting the Bangla spellcheck support in OpenOffice.org suite, you have to get the 'hunspell' thing on in the software installer. In fact this sounds more complex than what it is. But, for any work concerning Bangla text, like creating plain text, HTML pages, PDF-s, or even MS-Word compatible documents (if that unfortunate need comes up), importing and exporting to and from PDF, creating graphics with Bangla text, writing and reading Bangla websites and emails, parsing Bangla texts for specific strings, searching and replacing them, take it from me, I am using them for quite some time, you will never face any problem anywhere. And obviously OpenOffice.org is there with its whole armory, where you can use and manipulate Bangla text, any Bangla thing, at your will. Not just OOo, it works with Abiword or Kword or many other things like that. Most probably you can guess they are all word processors. Then for the plain text, there are very nice editors like Mousepad or Gedit. From them you can directly write Web-pages with the HTML tags inserted, and that is how I have written my website, all the pages. Actually, because everything, every damn (sorry Indra) thing is available in these Linux distros (most probably, I can exactly ensure that only in case of Fedora 10, as I have already said) a whole new world of working with Bangla text gets opened up before you. For to and from PDF there are in-built importers and exporters in OOo. And outside them there are things like xpdf-tools, Evince tools. (I think everyone is quite familiar with the idea that PDF-s are generated for some text being available in the very exact form and format that the author wants it to be on a machine where the support is enabled. My sister lives in a far away land for the last seventeen years and all this time I am writing her mails in PDF, because on her MAC the Bangla support is not there.) There are huge graphic suits like GIMP or Inkscape that handle Bangla text and graphics very efficiently together. But, as I said, I don't have the technical knowledge and efficiency like the many young developers on this list, I prefer Kolourpaint (a KDE software) that runs very nicely on my XFCE (you can use anything like Gnome, KDE, Xfce as your X-environment). I tried to exhaust all the possibilities I could imagine. Oh, one thing came up, I have written lots of equations and matrices and determinants in a Bangla text with OOo. Creating these mathematical things with OOo is really so exciting a thing. Concerning anything from all these, and also anything that I cannot imagine feel free to write mails. -- das ddts.randomink.org _______________________________________________ Ilug-cal-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://list.ilug-cal.org/mailman/listinfo/ilug-cal-discuss
