Rendering of the Bangla script is a complex job, especially when one has to be
within the Unicode limits. Hence, the technology behind Bangla rendering is considered to be
quite “bleeding edge”, and only the latest software support it. For example, Bangla
text rendering support is there only in the latest Qt
toolkit (Qt 3.2) which is used for KDE and
Pango, which is the text
rendering/layout engine of GTK 2
. Pango 1.1.1 and above
has a seperate module for Bangla. In addition to that, in the Free Software world,
Yudit can render Bangla
text correctly. However, the situation is improving slowly, and in the near future, we will
probably see Bangla rendering in Mozilla,
OpenOffice, etc. In fact, the beta version of OpenOffice (at the time
of writing) has partial support for Bangla - however, it still has some serious problems with
the split vowel signs. Starting from version 3.2.0, KDE applications (will) officially support
Bangla rendering too.