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What fonts to use for Bengali translation?

There are two broad types of Bengali fonts used now - ACSII or Non-Unicode fonts and Unicode fonts.

ACSII or Non-Unicode fonts
At the beginning of Bangla typing, Ananda Computers of Bangladesh invented a way to type Bengali in Apple computers. They invented a way to type Bengali alphabets by using the ASCII method and produced some Bengali fonts for this purpose. These fonts are widely known as the Bijoy fonts. Today also, the fonts of the Bijoy family are the most widely used Bengali fonts. Some favorite Bijoy fonts are SutonnyMJ, RinkiyMJ, KarnaphuliMJ, etc.

In course of time some other groups also produced new Bengali fonts but unfortunately they did not follow the same ASCII coding for the Bengali alphabets. As a result, Bengali text written by the fonts of one group could not be replaced by the fonts made by the other groups. This has created a lot of trouble in Bangla computing. Some other Bengali ASCII font families are Lekhoni, Prashika Shabda, Bangla Word, Lipi Mrittika, Lipi Ekushey, iLeap etc.

Unicode Bengali Font 
Unicode Bengali fonts are a recent addition in Bengali typing. The codes of all of the Bengali alphabets were defined by the Unicode Consortium and Unicode Bengali is the future of Bengali typing/translation because, unlike the ASCII fonts, these fonts follow a single coding system. "Vrinda" is the default Unicode Bengali font for Windows. Windows 7 also includes another Unicode Bengali font namely Sonar Bangla. Some other widely used and well-known Unicode Bengali fonts are SolaimanLipi, Siyamrupali, Bangla, Mukti, etc.

At present both Unicode and non-Unicode fonts are used and the translators has to choose carefully which font to use for a particular project.

Web-based contents
For web-based contents we need to use a Unicode font. This is an absolute requirement because now all of the computers, either Windows or Mac, can display Unicode Bengali fonts without any problem. So, the users do not need to install any new font or do not need to tweak their system to properly view the Bengali text. On the other hand, non-Unicode fonts use many different coding systems and a website made up of one of these fonts could not be viewed properly in a computer which does not have that font installed.

Contents for DTP
It is better to use a non-Unicode or ASCII font for the contents that would eventually be used in a DTP software such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Phtoshop, QuarkXpress etc. This is because most of the DTP software do not support Unicode Bengali fonts out of the box. This is a shame but this is true. There are some tweaks to make the Unicode Bengali fonts work in these DTP software but most of the typesetters are not aware of these techniques because they can not read Bengali.


Why I am the best person for you to do the Bengali DTP?
I know how to make the Unicode Bengali fonts work in the DTP software such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Phtoshop, QuarkXpress etc. So, you don't need to spend hours after hours in figuring out how to solve DTP problems of Unicode Bengali fonts. On the other hand, although Bengali ASCII fonts works well in the DTP software but some of the Bengali conjunct characters show distortions after DTP and those distortions need to fixed one by one. As most typesetters can not read Bengali, a second post-DTP proofreader is required to help the typesetter correct the text and this increase the cost of the process.

I can fulfill all your Bengali DTP need at a cost-effective way and guarantee an error-free output.