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TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2 119

Language Support

Typesetting Bengali in TEX Anshuman Pandey 1 Introduction

The Bengali (or ¯a˙ngl¯a bAÅÐA) is one of the thirteen primary scripts used throughout . Like other Indic scripts, the Bengali is derived from the ancient . The script is intimately tied with the Bengali , which according to the latest data from Ethnologue, is currently the fourth most spoken language in the world with roughly 189 million speakers [2]. The language is spoken mainly in the Indian province of West and in . Bengali has been the medium for many notable artists, of whom the famous litera- teur and the great film-maker are the best known. 2 The Script Of all the scripts derived from Brahmi, Bengali is most closely related historically to . The two scripts share a comparable inventory of conso- nant, vowel, and conjunct characters, however, aside from superficial form and design, the primary differ- ence is the phonetic value assigned to certain char- acters of the Bengali script.1 Like all Brahmi-based scripts, Bengali is techni- cally an -syllabic script. This system is based on the unit of the “graphic” syllable, or aks.ara, which by definition always ends in a vowel. Each basic consonant character in Bengali is understood to represent the consonant modified by the inherent

vowel a, eg. = . When a consonant is modified by any other vowel, the syllable is written using a form

of the vowel. For example, the syllable k¯a kA is

composed of the consonant ka k and the vowel ¯a A aA (diacritic form: ). Syllables consisting of only a vowel, or with a vowel in word- position, are written with the full form of the vowel. A “graphic” syllable consisting of a sequence of consonants is written using a specific conjunct

form, or yukt¯˙ aks.ar ÝقA‡Ö . For instance, the con-

· k

sonant cluster kka (k ) is written as a single kk , €, not laterally as . The latter form

1 For further details on Bengali phonology please con- sult Suniti Kumar Chatterji’ Origin and Development of the , Allen & Unwin: London, 1970–72, reprint of 1926 ed. 120 TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2

represents kaka,notkka. Such conjuncts are rela- TEX was first introduced to Bengali in 1992 tively easy to decipher because the conjunct retains when Avinash Chopde added a support module for some semblance to the individual elements it com- the HP Softfont ‘SonarGaon’ (sgaon) to his itrans prises. However, with others is a little package. ‘SonarGaon’ was designed by Anisur Rah-

more daunting because the form gives no indication man in 1990, and was available in three weights:

· ‡ Õ ·

of its constituents: .a (k ) , nga˙ ( ) normal, slanted, and compressed. Although it was

Ø · Ö ² ä,andtra ( ) . a decent Bengali for the time, it was less than complete in that it lacked several standard ligatures. The subscript character called hasanta (◦ ¬ )is used to indicate an elision of the inherent a from a To amend this deficiency, Muhammad Ali Mas- roor developed a package which supplemented the consonant. For example, k¬ is k,notka. In some in- stances, generally when dealing with poor or limited support for ‘SonarGoan’ in itrans. Called arosgn,or types, the hasanta is used in modifying consonants “Aro SonarGaon” (“more SonarGaon”), this pack- to produce conjuncts. The modified consonant is age extended the ‘SonarGaon’ font by providing in then written laterally with the following consonant a METAFONT source the missing from the parent font and a set of macros with which to access to produce a simplified . Therefore, € may these new extensions. theoretically be written as k¬k, but such practice is rare as traditional Bengali orthography places great The support for ‘SonarGaon’ and arosgn was importance on the proper formation of letters. later dropped from itrans partially because the font was retracted from the public domain. The other 3 Short History of Bengali factor was the development by Shrikrishna Patil of a The development of modern modes of printing and user-defined Type-1 PostScript font called “ItxBen- typesetting Bengali coincided with the assumption gali”. This font was adapted for use with itrans and 2 of government of Bengal by the British replaced ‘SonarGoan’. Company in 1772. Seeing the need to educate its Last, but not least, is a program called ‘Bengali officials in the vernacular, the British sought to pro- Writer’ developed by Abhijit Das (Barda).3 ‘Ben- vide a means by which to expedite such instruction. gali Writer’ is a text editor for the X11 windows The task was taken up by Nathaniel Brassey Hal- system which allows the user to type Bengali doc- hed who wrote a book titled A Grammar of the uments and save them in TEX format. Documents Bengal Language. Printed in 1778 at Hoogly (near savedinTEX format are then to be used with TEXin Calcutta), this was the first book containing Ben- conjunction with the ‘Bengali Writer TEX Interface’ gali characters printed with movable types. These (bwti) package. movable types were cast by Sir . The bwti package consists of a beautiful Bengali Wilkins, considered the pioneer of Indic type- METAFONT and a set of macros which facilitate the setting, not only instituted the mechanical print- inputting of Bengali text. The input system is not ing of Bengali, but even trained native technicians extremely fluid and has low readability. It appears and motivated them to apply their skills to other to be a verbatim reflection of the font encoding, and Indic scripts as well. One of Wilkins’ students, a conjuncts are defined as macros. For example, with man by the name of Panchanana Karmakar, eventu- bwti a word like digbija˙ idijÝ must be input ally brought forth a large inventory of Bengali types as idi\gb jy instead of digbija.ya as with the which led to further advancements in the printing of bengali package. Bengali [5]. 5Thebengali Package 4 Bengali and Packages for TEX The Bengali for TEX (bengali) package is housed The typesetting of Bengali gained another big boost on CTAN in the language/bengali/pandey/ direc- when it was introduced to electronic typesetting and tory. This package differs from those described in publishing. Initially, due to the complex nature of the above section in that it: Bengali conjuncts and the intricate design elements 1. provides a means aside from itrans and bwti of of the basic characters themselves, it was rather dif- typesetting Bengali ficult to find a containing a complete 2. provides a simple, stand-alone preprocessor in- set of conjuncts for the script, and/or a terface which was aesthetic in its display of the intricate 2 and complex glyphs. These and other Indic language packages are described in the article “An Overview of Indic Fonts for TEX” [4]. 3 For more information on ‘Bengali Writer’ and related utilities see http://www2.csa.iisc.ernet.in/~abhij/bwti/.

TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2 121 ² 3. implements the ‘’ scheme With a few exceptions — namely , tra ,

(see Section 5.2 for details) and bhra ×, and variants of these — Table 2 does not 4. provides a simple, macro-based method of de- show conjuncts formed with Ö or ya ,asmost limiting Bengali text, similar in form and style ligatures containing these two elements are produced to other Indic script packages like Devanagari in a relatively static vertical or lateral fashion. In

for TEX the case of ra,thera-phala ( ),¯ or the ligature form

5. complies with the New Font Selection Scheme of ra is placed beneath the consonant: Ô¯ pra and ­

(NFSS) ׯ sra.Inthecaseofya,theya-phala ( ) is placed ×­ 6. incorporates the latest version of the ‘Bengali’ after the consonant: Ô­ pya and sya.

METAFONT developed by Abhijit Das (Barda) Additionally, when ra Ö is the initial element in a consonant conjunct, it is written as a superscript 5.1 The ‘Bengali’ Font diacritic called repha. For instance, the word karma

Das designed his ‘Bengali’ METAFONT after study- is written kÑÆ karma, with the above the . ing the various types employed in the modern print- As there are no character primitives in the bn ing of Bengali books in India. Das emphasized that font, producing conjuncts containing non-traditional he did not model the font after the design and form is a problem. A few of these have been of any particular typeface, nor did he employ any in- accounted for, but there may be cases which have struments in its development, but relied heavily on been overlooked. One solution is to use the hasanta crude approximations made by the naked eye. Upon to explicitly produce such characters. If the prepro- close inspection, the characters of Das’s METAFONT cessor detects a conjunct it does not recognize it will adhere to the traditional Bengali orthographic style ‘create’ one by joining the full sizes with a hasanta. found in many printed books, and rival many mod- The result is not pretty, but it is a solution! ern Bengali of the highest quality. A few subtle adjustments were needed The beautiful ‘Bengali’ (bn) font is currently to correctly align the placement of vowel available in two shapes: normal (bnr)andslanted below consonants. The preprocessor manages such (bnsl). It contains an almost complete inventory kernings and therefore manual adjustments are not of Bengali vowels, consonants, numerals, diacritics, needed. and marks. The font does lack three Since the font contains several complex liga- rare characters: ¯r (long vocalic ‘r’), (vocalic ‘l’, tures which will produce rather unsatisfactory out- ˚ ¯˚ put at small sizes such as 8pt, font magnifications resembling the numeral 9: 9), and l (long vocalic ‘l’).4 ˚ below 10pt are not supported. Therefore attempts Nonetheless, the font contains the entire reper- to use bn in footnotes and with such NFSS com- toire of traditional Bengali conjunct and ligature mands as \small will result in a message from TEX forms, and also a few extra ligatures used in complaining about a missing metric file. Perhaps a loan words. In addition to the conjunct forms given solution is possible in the near future. in Table 2, Bengali has a few special consonant- 5.2 Transliterated Input

vowel ligatures formed from the vowel ¤, and in Bengali text is entered in transliteration. Each char-

one case the vowel r ¦. These are illustrated in the chart below: ˚ acter in the Bengali has been assigned a

corresponding value based on the Roman ,

· ¤  · ¤  g gu hu

or a combination of signs from the Roman alphabet.

· ¤  Ø · Ö · ¤ ³

Ö ru tru The author has adapted the ‘Velthuis’ translitera-

· ¥  Ò · Ø · ¤ üÙ

Ö ruu ntu tion scheme for the bengali package.

Ë · ¤ Ð · g · ¤ ã

"su  lgu The ‘Velthuis’ scheme was developed in 1990

· ¦  × · Ø · ¤ þ h h.r stu by Frans Velthuis as a means of providing translit- 4 The existence of these characters in the traditional Ben- erated input for his Devanagari for TEX package, or gali syllabary is debatable. Although The Standard, devnag. As the Bengali syllabary resembles the De- Version 2.0 does not place the long forms of these characters vanagari, the ‘Velthuis’ scheme is perfectly suitable in the traditional ordering, it does reserve the positions they would occupy were they to be included in the proper arrange- to transliterate Bengali (and, for that matter, any ment. Nor does it list them under the heading ‘Independent other Indic script). It was necessary to add a few Vowels’, but places them instead under ‘Generic Additions.’ extensions to the scheme, otherwise it has remained Unicode also gives the diacritic form of these characters [7]. largely unchanged from the original. The scheme as However, the ISO draft standard 15919 for the transliteration of Indic scripts does show the two long forms in the tradi- modified for Bengali is given in Table 1. tional arrangement [6]. 122 TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2

stops sonorants vowels

cv cv cv

a k

ka ka Y ya ya a a

à aA ◦ A

kha Ý ya˙ .ya ¯a aa

¢ ◦ g

ga Ö ra ra i i

G £ ◦ Á

gha Ä ra ~ra ¯ı ii

¤ ◦ Ù Ð

Õ na˙ "na la u u

¥ ◦ Í b

ca ba u¯ uu

¦ ◦ Ï È C cha va r .r

˚

¨ ◦

ja Ë ´sa "sa e e

© E◦ Â

jha F .sa .sa ai

ª e◦ A É

na˜ ~na × sa sa o

« e◦ Ç Ì .ta .ta h ha au

Z .tha .tha numerals d. a .da special characters cv

Ê .ra Ra cv

¼

d. ha .dha 0 0 Å . .m anusv¯ara

½ Î

.rha Rha 1 1 Û m˙ ~m candrabindu

¾ Æ

. a .na 2 2 À h. .h

¿ ¬

Ø ta ta 3 3 & hasanta

4 B

Þ tha tha 4 4 T khan. d. ata

5 º

d da da 5 5 . | d¯a˙mr.i 6

Ü dha dha 6 6 7

Ò na na 7 7 8

Ô pa 8 8 9 f pha 9 9

b ba ba c Ú bha CSX+ 8-bit scheme ‘Velthuis’ 7-bit scheme Ñ ma ma

Table 1: Inventory of Bengali Characters

TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2 123

· k € Ø · Þ ® Ñ · Ú · Ö Þ

k kk tth mbhr

k · Ì Ø · Ò Ñ · Ñ ¯ ß

k.t  tn mm

‚ ° à · Ø Ø · b Ñ · Ð

k kt tb ml

k · Ñ Ø · Ñ Ð · k ± á

km „ tm lk

² â · Ö Ø · Ö Ð · g

k kr tr lg

† ú ä · Ð Þ · b Ð · Ì

k kl thb l.t

k · b d · g Ð · D ð å

kb ƒ dg l.d

‡ ñ æ · F d · G Ð · Ô

k k.s dgh lp

ˆ ò ç · F · Æ d · d Ð · b

k k.s.n dd lb

· F · Ñ ‰ d · Ü ó Ð · Ñ è

k k.sm ddh lm

Š ô é · × d · b Ð · Ð

k ks db

g · Ü d · Ú Ë · c õ ê

gdh ‹ dbh "sc

· Ò Œ d · Ú · Ö ö Ë · C ë

g gn dbhr "sch

Ž ÷ ì · Ñ d · Ñ Ë · Ò

g gm dm "sn

g · Ð Ü · Ò Ë · Ñ ø í

lm DZ dhn "sm

· b  Ü · b ù Ë · Ð î

g gb dhb "sl

· Ò à Ò · Ø ü Ë · b ï

G ghn nt "sb

á þ ð · k Ò · Ø · b F · k

Õ "nk ntb .sk

· k · F â Ò · Ø · Ö ÿ F · k · Ö ñ

Õ "nk.s ntr .skr

Õ · Ã Ò · Þ F · Ì Ä ò

"nkh ã nth .s.t

Õ · g Ò · d F · Å ó

"ng ä nd .s.

å û ô · G Ò · d · b F · Æ

Õ "ngh ndb .s.n

Õ · Ñ Ò · Ü F · Ô Æ õ

"ngm æ ndh .sp

ç Ç ö · c Ò · Ò F · f

c cc nn .sph

c · C Ò · b F · Ñ È ÷

cch è nb .sm

é É ø · C · b Ò · Ñ × · k

c cchb nm sk

c · É Ò · × × · k · Ö Ê ù

c~n ê skr

ë Ë ú · j Ô · Ì × · k · Ð

j jj p.t skl

j · j · b Ô · Ø × · Ã Ì û

jjb ì pt skh

í Í ü · Â Ô · Ò × · Ì

j jjh pn s.t

· É î Ô · Ô Î × · Ø ý

j j~n pp st

j · b Ô · Ð × · Ø · Ö Ï ÿ

jb ï pl str

É · c Ô · × × · Þ Ð 

~nc sth

· C ¡ f · Ð Ñ × · Ò 

É ~nch phl sn

¢ Ò  · j b · j × · Ô

É ~nj bj sp

É · Â b · d × · Ô · Ð Ó 

~njh £ bd spl

¤ Ô  · Ì b · Ü × · f

Ì .t.t bdh sph

Ì · b b · b × · b Õ 

.tb ¥ bb sb

¦ Ö  · D b · Ð × · Ñ

D .d.d bl sm

Æ · Ì Ú · Ö × · Ð × 

.n.t § bhr sl

· Z ¨ Ú · Ð Ø h · Æ 

Æ .n.th bhl h.n

· D © Ñ · Ò Ù h · Ò

Æ .n.d mn hn

· Æ ª Ñ · Ô Ú h · Ñ

Æ .n.n mp hm

· Ñ « Ñ · f Û h · b >

Æ .nm mph hb

¬ Ü } · Ø Ñ · b h · Ð

Ø tt mb hl

Ø · Ø · b Ñ · Ú Ê · g Ý  ttb ­ mbh Rg

Table 2: Supported Bengali conjuncts

124 TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2

Тeb eÑAÖ kAYƸ keh ×Æ­A Öib

ek {\bn ke la{}ibe mor kaarya, kahe sandhyaa rabi

jgB Öeh iÒ¬Ö Cib º

iÒÝA "suni.yaa jagaT rahe niruttar chabi |

Ô¯dÁÔ iCи e× kihи AiÑ

ÑAiÌÖ maa.tir pradiip chila, se kahila, sbaami

eYÌÙkÙ ×AÜ­ kiÖb ØA aAiÑ º

aAÑAÖ aamaar ye.tuku saadhya kariba taa aami |

ÖibůÒAÞ ZAkÙÖ ß -- rabindranaath .thaakur}

Figure 1: A Poem by Rabindranath Tagore

Bengali does not distinguish between ba and va, these Bengali documents should have the extension and collapses both into ba. For this reason, as a gen- .bn in the file name. This lets the preprocessor know eral rule, all words containing va should be translit- that the file is associated with it. erated as ba. However, when parsing conjuncts the Additionally, any shape- or size-changing com- preprocessor will accept va in place of ba,sothe mands such as \large or \slshape should follow

word AiÑ may be transliterated as either svaami the \bn macro. Otherwise, the declaration of the or sbaami. If the preprocessor detects va outside of default font as bn will be over-written by the NFSS a conjunct, it will assume that the Assamese va is macro’s default declaration of the Computer Mod- intended, and will produce an undesired output. ern fonts. The result will be a jumble of characters, Another significant is the use of {} to not the intended Bengali. break the lexical scan. This is important when two short vowels are encoded in succession. The brack- 5.4 The Preprocessor ets will prevent the preprocessor from interpreting Once the Bengali text has been transliterated, the

the two short vowels as a diphthong. For example, file is run through a program called a preprocessor. EÐeb compare Тeb la{}ibe with laibe. A preprocessor is the ideal method for enabling the The above two points are illustrated in Figure 1. typesetting of such complex scripts as Bengali be- As indicated in the figure, the transliterated input cause it presents the user with a simple interface for text is placed within the scope delimited by {\bn character input. The user has only to be concerned and }. This allows the preprocessor to locate and with the transliteration, because the preprocessor properly translate the input to the appropriate font will manage the conversion of the input text into character codes. character codes with which TEX is familiar. A preprocessor called beng has been developed 5.3 The Macros for use with the bengali package. It is a small pro- The initialization for the bengali package is managed gram written in C and based in function on the by the beng style file. The style defines: preprocessor for Charles Wikner’s package. 1. the macro \bn as the delimiter for Bengali text. The syntax for its use is: The definition of \bn sets the current font to the bn family, initializes bn for use with NFSS, beng infile[.bn][outfile[.tex]] and provides an appropriate \baselineskip so there is adequate clearance between lines for super- and subscript characters. where infile is the name of the Bengali document. 2. a bengali counter which may be used to pro- The .bn extension is optional, as is the target out- duce Bengali numerals for numbering and put file. By default the preprocessor will name the enumerated environments. output file the same as the input, but with the ex- An idiosyncracy of the \bn macro is that a curly tension .tex. brace must immediately precede it and that a space Running the preprocessor without any argu- must immediately follow it: {\bn .Otherwise,the ments invokes the interactive mode. The input and preprocessor will return an error stating it was un- output filenames must then be manually entered at able to locate a valid Bengali delimiter. the prompts. The version number and other infor- The document containing Bengali text is to be mation can be obtained from the preprocessor by considered as any other TEX file. As Bengali text is invoking it with -h. The author’s email address is delimited by {\bn text },anyotherTEX macros and also given in case any problems arise with the use of packages may be used in the document. However, the program. TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2 125

5.5 A Note on Hyphenation 7 What’s Next? There is no tradition of hyphenating words in In- 7.1 Refining the font dian orthography. In manuscripts, the use of hy- In addition to creating a suitable boldface, Das and phens is non-existent, and in early printed mate- the author have discussed replacing the explicit con- rials, hyphenation was applied arbitrarily between junct glyphs with character primitives. One advan- any aks.ara-s when the end of a line was reached. tage of using primitives is the opening up of several Nowadays, printers are more keenly aware of word- positions for other characters. The disadvantage breaks at the end of lines, and attempt to maintain is replicating traditional ligature forms with prim- syntactic sense when applying hyphenation. itives: ligatures can be formed laterally or by juxta- Unfortunately, such “intelligent” hyphenation position, but this method serves an injustice to the cannot be produced with the bengali package. When aesthetic of the Bengali script. the preprocessor converts transliterated input into Depending on the number of character positions internal character codes, the output deviates sub- available after the font has been revised, new char- stantially from what TEX would consider a ‘word’. acters may be introduced to the repertoire. Possible However, if by chance a word is broken at the end additions may be the characters ¯r, l,and¯l, along of a line, TEX will produce a because the with their diacritic forms (described˚ ˚ in further˚ de- bn font possesses a hyphen character at the stan- tail in Section 5.1). Other possible inclusions may dard position. A hyphen may otherwise be encoded be the currency signs given in Unicode. within a given text simply by typing the hyphen Taco Hoekwater has generously offered to pro- character: -. duce Type-1 versions of the bn font. Once the font 6 Support for Assamese is stabilized, the conversions will be performed and made available as part of the bengali package. The script used in the far eastern Indian province of is nearly identical to the Bengali script. 7.2 Uniting babel and bengali

The Assamese (or Asam¯ı˙ya a×ÑÁÝ) script (also the Jun Takashima has developed hyphenation patterns name of the associated language) differs from the for Sanskrit and to be used in conjunc- Bengali in the design of two consonant characters, tion with Johannes Braams’s babel package. As the although the correspondence between pronunciation lexica of both Kannada and Bengali are heavily in- and script is also different in a number of respects fluenced by Sanskrit, it is feasible that either the

between Assamese and Bengali. These two charac- Sanskrit or Kannada hyphenation pattern may be È ters are ra Ä and va . adapted for use with the Bengali language. These characters were not part of the original Such an adaptation would require an input - bn font developed by Das. The author has created coding scheme compatible with the babel conven- them based on the design found in Halhed’s Bengali tion. One idea could be to modify the beng prepro- grammar [3] and the descriptions given by Banerji cessor to convert the ‘Velthuis’ transliterated input [1]. to this babel-compliant scheme. It is interesting that these two characters are used in Halhed’s grammar. Their appearance in the 7.3 Printing Dates in Bengali

book implies that they were commonly used in Ben- A new method for printing dates in Bengali needs Ö

gali orthography, and that the switch from Ä to to be developed. This new method would print the b and from È to must have occurred within the past date according to both the Western and traditional 200 years. Also, it is probably during this time that Bengali . Both styles are commonly used these earlier forms were restricted to the Assamese throughout Bengali-speaking regions of the world. script. Of the two, the Western style is easier to im- A group led by Jugal Kalita is believed to be plement. As is expected, the macro does 5 \today working on an Assamese package. However, no in- not produce the correct result in the Bengali envi- dication of progress has been posted at the project’s ronment. To overcome this, Masroor, who also de- site, and as of yet, nothing has been released. veloped the arosgn package, wrote a LATEX package called bngtoday, intended for use with itrans.6 This package provides the macro \BanglaToday which gives the current Western date transliterated into

Bengali. For example, June is simply J¯un jÍÒ. 5 Details are available at http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/ ~talukdar/assam/language/assamlang.html. 6 On CTAN at language/bengali/bngtoday.sty 126 TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 2

The traditional Bengali is quite differ- References ent from the Western and therefore requires a bit [1] Banerji, R. D. The Origin of the Bengali Script. more work for correct implementation. Due to the Nababharat Publishers: Calcutta, 1973. Reprint arrangement of the Bengali calendar, Bengali and of 1973 1st ed. Western overlap. Thus, a given Western [2] Grimes, Barbara F. [ed]. Ethnologue: may be known by two different names in Ben- of the World. Institute of Linguistics, gali. For example, June may either be Jyais..tha Ej­ó ¯ Inc. Dallas, Texas, 1996. [Note: Information or As¯ar aA×AÊ, depending on whether the first or . on most widely spoken languages may be found second half of the month is being referred to. Fur- at http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/. The list thermore, Ej­ó may also refer to the last half of was last updated in February 1999.]

May, and aA×AÊ to the first half of July. Additionally, in the Bengali calendar the first [3] Halhead, Nathaniel Brassey. A Grammar of the four days of the month have special names, and or- Bengal Language. Printed at Hoogly, Bengal, dinal numbers used for days of the month also have 1778. distinct forms. The new package would automate [4] Pandey, Anshuman. “An Overview of Indic the calculations needed to produce the date accord- Fonts for TEX”, TUGboat, 19(2), 1998. pp. 115– ing to these conventions. 120. [5] Priolkar, Anant K. The Printing Press in India: 7.4 Implementing CSX+ in bengali Its Beginnings and Early Development [Being CSX+, or Classical Sanskrit eXtended+, is an 8- a quatercentenary commemoration study of the bit encoding scheme which parallels the convention advent of printing in India (in 1556)]. Marathi adopted for the ISO Committee Draft 15919 [6]. Samshodhana Mandala: Bombay, 1958. Contrary to what its name indicates, CSX+ uni- [6] Stone, Anthony [ed]. ISO Committee Draft formly supports all Indic scripts. The CSX+ scheme 15919: Transliteration of Devanagari and Re- is modelled after IBM Code Page 437 and occupies lated Scripts into Latin Characters. Avail- characters in the Upper ASCII block. Table 1 shows able at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/ the CSX+ scheme as it pertains to Bengali. homepages/stone_catend/trdcd1c.htm. Currently the beng preprocessor only recognizes [7] The . The Unicode Stan- 7-bit input in the form of the ‘Velthuis’ transliter- dard, Version 2.0. Addison-Wesley Developers ation scheme. The author intends to extend the Press: Reading, Massachusetts, 1997. preprocessor to recognize the 8-bit CSX+ encoding scheme as well.  Anshuman Pandey 8 Notes University of Washington Department of Asian Languages The author was informed of a book by Fiona G. E. and Literature Ross titled The Printed Bengali Character (Curzon: 225 Gowen Hall, Box 353521 Richmond, 1999) which provides lucid and detailed Seattle, WA 98195 information on Bengali orthography and typogra- [email protected] phy. The author was strongly encouraged to review http://weber.u.washington.edu/ Ross’s work, but unfortunately, a copy of the book ~apandey/ could not be acquired in time. It is hoped that this does not diminish the force of the article.