Typing Bengali was never been easy for me as I am not much familiar with Bengali keyboard. Specially when it comes to joining letter, it is like a night mare. It became so hard as I have never learned traditional Bangla typing even though have full spirit to write Bengali. I must admit Bengali is one of the hardest language in the world when it comes to learn and write.
Over a year ago I had come across Google Transliteration which I found amazing to type phonetic Bengali without even knowing basic Bengali keyboard layout or typing. You can now type over hundred languages without even knowing the typing for a specific language however you must have to know sounds or pronunciation of the words. Other annoying thing that I found with Bengali fonts and typing there is no consistency when it comes to the joining letters. This is probably another example of lack of communication and support between the developers. People like to do things in their own way but they should consider the broader community acceptability and keep the consistency. Now I see when I read any Bengali in my Android phone all the joining letters move around and make a real mess even hard to read. I must say I saw more consistency in Apple Mac OSX and iOS for Unicode letters specially Bengali fonts.
There are lots of ways now you can type or write Bengali even though the hard part is to get the correct spelling without knowing actual Bengali typing. I found two best ways to write or type Bengali and it will not cost you anything. Now I am a bit fussy when it comes to install software in my laptop or computer. I tend not to install any software without having really some good feedback or productivity. If you are like me or have the same taste for installing software then you can try my suggestion.
Avro Keyboard:
As I said you might have different choice but I found it quite user friendly, spelling and word suggestion. The good thing with this software, it floats the toolbar on top of the page and you can shift around as you like and switch between English and Bengali quite easily. You can download the Avro Software from their website. To download the software click here.
I have installed this software in Windows 7 Pro and I believe it supports Windows XP and later version of Microsoft Operating Systems. When I was writing this post, I saw they were working for Mac version of software called iAvro. Hope this will release soon. When you install the software the toolbar appears on top of the desktop screen. Basically it floats on top of any window or application opened, just need to hover to highlight. Here is the screen shot –
Now when I am intending to type Bengali in Microsoft Word or in any webpage input, you just need to click on the button to switch the language. Here is the screen shot when Bengali font is activated.
When typing in the websites like Facebook or Twitter –
Google Input Tool:
The other interesting tool I found is called “Google Input Tool” which is basically a Google Chrome Extension based on Google Transliterate technology. This is another handy tool for Google Chrome user. I am not a big fan of Internet Explorer even though cannot get rid off it due to Microsoft core product and only browser. I love Google chrome, specially if you are nerd kind of person you can do too many things including debugging, playing with website security leaks and errors even you can change the any website style virtually using Web Developer tool. There are millions of extension and lot of them are quite handy and productive. You cannot do these things in Internet Explorer. To download Google Chrome click here.
Once you installed Google Chrome you can download those production nice extensions out there. Another cool thing with Chrome, you can login to Chrome and it will store all your bookmarks, passwords and extensions in the cloud. So you don’t have to install these extensions in each machine. I use mostly six computers including my home laptops but now I can see all my extensions from any computer and I don’t need to remember hundreds of passwords for different websites. Another good thing is, you can access to opened windows in other devices from any device when you click on the new tab look at the bottom of the browser then you will see the other devices option with list of windows open. Anyway, I cannot finish here what you can do in Chrome but I simply love it.
You can download Google Input Tool for free from Google store, click here to download.
When Google Input Tool installed, the icon will appear in the Chrome toolbar like below. To turn the Bengali writing on, just click on the toolbar then select Bengali. You can choose phonetic to spell Bengali in English (Transliterate).
Once you switch the Bengali writing tool you can start typing Bengali. This is pretty cool as you don’t have to install this in every computer as I said earlier as it will save it in the cloud. See the example below –
Bear in mind, it is not limited to Bengali only. You can write Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Thai and many more languages using this handy input tool.
Hope this will make Bengali writing easier for you like me.