Bangla Unicode Fonts in Firefox 2.0

Just a several months back like many people, I used to browse the Bangla sites (specially the Bangla news papers) with Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Because Firefox (FF) couldn’t handle the Bangla fonts. Bangla fonts appeared in the Firefox was scattered and broken. Though as a browser FF is always my first choice, for the Bangla sites I stucked on IE7. Recent days I am able to handle the Bangla sites with FF smoothly. But I am hearing many complains from various persons regard the problem I’ve faced earlier. For this purpose, I decided to write an article which will guide anyone to fix this problem. This article is going to guide you for setting up FF for viewing Bangla unicode fonts. For writing this article, I took help from Bokaader Poddyo.

First of all check that whether you can read Bangla Fonts with your FF. Just try to read the following boxed sentenced.

সুখ নাইরে পাগল… কী আছে দুনিয়ায়!

If you can’t read then you surely need to carry out the following instruction guide. By the way this guide is for “Windows XP Service Pack 2”. So make sure you are using that. I’ve not tried whether it works in SP1 or Vista. But as the release dates of Windows XP and Windows 2003 is almost same, it should work in Windows 2003 server.

• Step 01:

Download the latest version of Firefox.

• Step 02:

Download Unicode Bangla Fonts from the web and install them on your operating system. Here I am using the Solaiman Lipi font.

• Step 03:

Download the file for complex scripts and install it. After installing the file, go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Language, and check the Install files for complex scripts and right-to-left languages option. Click Ok.

• Step 04:

Go to the menu bar of your browser for Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General -> Languages -> Choose -> Select a language to add. Add Bengali as a language. Click Ok.

• Step 05:

Go to the browser’s “view” menu and set the “character encoding” to: Unicode (UTF-8).

• Step 06:

For customizing the fonts to any particular font; just go to Tools -> Options -> Content -> Fonts and Colors -> Advanced. In the pop up window titled Fonts, select Bengali from the Fonts for pulldown Menu and set a Bengali font of your choice (Here for example I am using Solaiman Lipi) for various kinds of fields like Serif, Sans Serif, Monospace, etc. to be shown on webpages.

Now your FF is fully compatible for the Bangla Unicode Fonts. Visit this page again and see the test sentence written in Bangla at the beginning of this article, whether you can read it completely. Hope you will successfully read that sentence.