Bengali character picker

Reference material:

Quick start

(You must have JavaScript enabled.) Choose a view (see below). Click on characters/shapes to insert text into the output field or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field).

Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the tabs to get further information about the characters. You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow box to set preferences or search (regular expressions allowed).

About the chart

Includes all the characters in the Unicode Bengali block. Note: There was an important addition to the Bengali block in version 4.1, a single character for khanda ta, that may not yet be supported in many fonts.

Transcribe command This tab will convert text in the Radice transliteration (see below) to Bengali characters, automatically, and add the result to the end of the text in the output area. By default, all the text in the output area is converted, but you can also select a range of characters (by just highlighting with the mouse) for conversion.

Alternative views are available. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet, shape, transcript or fontgrid.

Alphabet This view is likely to be more useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Bengali. Consonants are in a modified Indian articulatory arrangement, to the left. To their right are all the other characters. Independent vowels are at the top. Below these are the vowel signs and combining characters. The line below the combining characters contains punctuation. The bottom lines contain numbers 0-9 and related symbols, and punctuation.

Click on the 'Advanced' arrow top right for less often used characters.

Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. In addition to single characters, it includes groups of characters that interact to form new shapes. This is not an exhaustive list of shapes in Bengali writing, but may help locate many ligatures and conjuncts you don't recognise.

Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity. The orange shapes at the top typically indicate the left-most or top-most part of a character shape; characters and combinations that start with that shape are arranged together. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other. The 'misc' section at the bottom lists a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.

Where the shape of the characters involved in a cluster doesn't really change I don't usually list the combination here. You should search for the two shapes and add a virama between them. For example, some clusters are indicated by bringing two characters close together, eg. compare with . Also, conjuncts ending in YA are excluded: use the combining YA shape shown near the bottom. The same goes for the initial RA, which ends up as a superscript .

Transcript I use this for typing in text for which I have a transliteration, or for creating transliterations.

The characters used for transliteration are arranged similarly to the sounds in a standard IPA chart. (Sometimes the actual pronunciation will vary. Transliteration symbols are arranged according to their nominal sounds.) The large characters represent the transcription used for William Radice's book, but the small letters alongside on a grey background indicate the ISO 15919 transcription (from the main table here) where they differ. After that, on the white background, are phonetic characters typically associated with the transliteration characters. (In the case of multiples, tooltips often explain usage contexts.)

You can use the transcription letters to find a Bengali character and add it to the output area, or you can click directly on the transcription letter to produce a transcription.

For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.

Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).

Useful URIs

Instructions for use

Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Wazu Japan, Alan Wood

Other pickers

Introduction to Bengali (my rough notes)

Bengali in UniView

If something is missing

... let me know.