বঙ্গলিপি (BonGoLipi)

What is BongoLipi?
Why is BongoLipi?
Why not Unicode?
OK, so what is BongoLipi?
Which language/technology Bongolipi uses?
What kind of licensing does Bongolipi have?
What is a transliteration scheme?

What is BongoLipi?

BongoLipi is a Bengali transliteration project. The goal of the project is to proliferate use of Bengali on internet and on computing systems as a whole.

Why is BongoLipi?

There have been piecemeal efforts towards this goal with varying success. As a result there is no unified standard of writing bengali on a regular computer keyboard. We recognize that it is not very prudent to nominate or promote any particular standard - be it transliteration scheme or font. Instead we tend to provide a framework to support multiple standards through configuration. The framework should also be easy to support any new standard that comes along with minimal effort.

Why not Unicode?

BongoLipi is designed to supports unicode. Today, you can write Unicode in Bongolipi. However, you cannot export it to PDF yet because of the limitation of an underlying library.

Unicode in principle solves the problems of varying standards and addresses the issues BongoLipi is trying to address. However, that's 'in principle'. The Unicode implementation is still evolving and not yet as ubiquitous as one would expect.

For example, in Bangla, unicode handles ra + Japhala in a special way. Most of the applications support this. However, the Java editor library Bongolipi uses has a bug that makes it impossible to render ra + Japhala in Unicode font in Bongolipi.

The proper rendering of Unicode is as much dependent on the client machine setup as it is on our software. And it's very difficult to assume any uniformity of client setup vis-a-vis Unicode.

We will keep on developing Unicode support. We believe ultimately that's the way to go. But till such time comes when Unicode becomes really ubiquitous, we will be supporting non-unicode too.

OK, so what is BongoLipi?

In addition to what we have discussed already (mostly vapor emanating from furious hand-waving), there will be

• a transliteration engine code, which can be run on a server or embedded in other products. For example, the engine can be embedded in a Word Processor application or a Spreadsheet application which can then transparently support writing Bengali.
• an editor. This will be a minimalist Word Processing application. The main purpose of this editor is to do a reference implimentation of the transliteration engine. But we hope this will be useful enough.
• API. A Java API is a must. There will be an HTTP or XML API. People don't call this API. They have given fancy names like webservice. Whatever. Depending upon where this project finally lands, there may be PHP , C#, Python APIs too. But don't count on them just yet.
• a browser extension to write Unicode bangla within browsers.
• a toolset to configure the engine. Ideally this will be WYSIWYG. (That's a fancy way of saying What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get. 80's speak. We don't use that often. These days we call it GUI or just UI. Graphical User Interface or User Interface. Now we are talking twenty first century.)
• an Apache module. Now that will be very useful and handy, but lot of coding too. Since the codebase is written entirely in Java, we have to port it to C to make it an Apache module. Other languages may also be used to write Apache module, e.g. Perl, but we want people to maintain the code too. Hence C

Which language/technology Bongolipi uses?

I started writing Bongolipi (it was named Webtrans/WTrans then) in pure Java in 2000-2001, in part to learn Java better. I was green on Java and was coding with Java 1.2. That's why you may find some not-so-elegant coding and design. Though, overall, I think the design is quite good. There is no strong affinity towards any particular language or technology, apart from some common sense guidelines - like it should not be some obscure technology, preferably should be open source, can be deployed easily with minimum cost etc. Having said that Java with Apache-Tomcat, Ant, XML technology have served us quite good. We do not have any compelling reason to move away from that. At least for now.

What kind of licensing does Bongolipi have?

Bongolipi is released under GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt). For more information, see the License page.

What is a transliteration scheme?

A transliteration scheme is a scheme of writing Bengali on via roman letters. Most of the schemes follow some kind of phonetic way of writing. For example, the bengali of leaf can be written as 'paataa'. Some scheme may write it as 'pAtA'.