There are more than enough well written HOWTOs out there to deal with fonts in Linux. The purpose of this HOWTO, however, is to put together a small document that describes anything and everything needed to work with Bengali fonts in Linux.
Fonts from "Free Bangla Fonts Project"
Even though there are quite a few Bengali fonts available from different sources, this HOWTO will mainly focus on installing and using fonts provided by Free Bangla Fonts Project (FBFP).
Installing using the rpm package
If you are a rpm [read: RedHat %#$!@] user the easiest way to install the fonts from FBFP is by using the rpm package. The rpm package can be downloaded from here or here. Just install the rpm package as you would do for any other rpm pacakge.
Installing using individual font file
If you can not or do not want to use the rpm package, there is always the good old tgz packages. Remember that you should have root privilege when you execute the commands mentioned here.
Download the files you want to install from here. Note that you will find several different tgz packages in FBFP. Each of them contain different font faces, i.e. they all look different from one another. Once you have downloaded all the packages you want, extract all the .ttf file(s). Basically run the following command on each .tgz or .tar.gz file you have downloaded.
tar -zxvf your_font_package.tar.gz
This will create a new directory that will contain different files that comes with the font package. We are only interested about the .ttf files.
Create a new directory where you want to install these fonts. For rest of this document we will assume we are installing the fonts in:
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/bengali
Copy the .ttf files we just extracted in to this directory, and execute the following commands:
> cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/bengali > ttmkfdir > mkfontdir > chkfontpath -q -a /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/bengali
Now we will add the new directory to fontconfig configuration. Usually this configuration file is in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. Open this file with you choice of text editor and look for the part that looks somewhat like shown below:
Ankur is often involved in development based on cutting edge technology. Ankur developers were the first to come with a Bangla Open Type font, and the Ankur Bangla Live CD is often considered to be the best among the localised Live CD distributions out there. If you want to be a member of the Ankur family, please do get in touch with us at core at bengalinux org. For more information on volunteering refer to the Ankur Developers' Guide .
