Bengali character picker 10

Notes:

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 - for example, to find the letter GA, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).
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.; All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)
Alternative views: The following alternative views are available by clicking just below the page title. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, default, shape, transcription or fontgrid.; Default 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. Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity, and include groups of characters that interact to form new shapes (this is not an exhaustive list of shapes in Bengali writing, but may help locate most ligatures and conjuncts you don't recognise).; Each orange key near the top of the page represents a significant part of the shape of two or more characters; as you mouse over the keys, characters and combinations of characters that incorporate that shape are displayed below. Click on these characters to add them to the output. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other.; The shapes below the grey line are 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 .; A small orange plus sign to the right of a shape indicates that you will find similar shapes after the large plus sign to the right of the current line. These characters may cause confusion because they share elements, or because their shape may be similar, though not quite the same.; Transcription I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonetic transcriptions.; The large characters on a grey background represent characters in one of two transcriptions systems: first as used in William Radice's book, Teach Yourself Bengali; second as used for ISO 15919 transcriptions (from the main table here).. To type Bengali text starting from a transcription, click on these characters. If there is only one Bengali character corresponding to the transcription letter, it is inserted directly into the output field. If there are multiple alternatives, these are presented to you in a selection list: click on the Bengali character you need in the selection list and it is added to the output.; Each Bengali character is associated with a phonetic symbol (a Latin/IPA symbol on white background to its left in the selection lists). If there is more than one possible phonic representation you will see the selection list divided appropriately. As you select characters, the phonetic symbol to its left is stored. If you click on the Phonemes button, below the output area, these are all added to the output. This provides a quick way of generating a phonetic transcription from a Latin transcription. In some cases a Bengali character is repeated within the same selection list because it has more than one possible phonetic equivalent - in such cases, choose the right one if you want to generate this phonetic transcription.; To get a good phonetic transcription, you will need to click on one of the squares labelled Inherent vowel between two consonants with no vowel signs. This will add nothing to the Bengali output, but will make the inherent vowel appear in the phonetic transcription.; Just above the output area there is a line of Latin characters. This represents the union of all transcription and phonetic characters, and is provided in case you wish to just type in a transcription directly.; For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.; As you mouse over the Latin characters on the grey background, the corresponding Bengali characters are also displayed near the top of the page. This is to aid in searching, but you can also select characters from there.; 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).
Special commands: Phonemes While you click on Malayalam characters in the Phonic view, the picker automatically records in a buffer the associated phonemic character to the left of each character you click on. Clicking on this will dump those characters into the output area at the current cursor position, and clear the buffer. It is quite basic (for example, it doesn't take into account use of the delete key), but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Malayalam characters and the phonemic transcription.; Hyphens are provided for the inherent vowel sounds to help produce these transcriptions. They produce no output in Malayalam script, but the phonemic value is stored in the buffer.; Latn>>Beng This tab will convert text in the Radice transliteration (see above) 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.
Other features: For further information about features of the tool or user interface, see How to use..
Useful URIs: Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Wazu Japan, Alan Wood; Introduction to Bengali (my rough notes); Bengali script description in Wikipedia; Bengali in UniView; Other pickers
If something is missing: ... let me know.