Reading Anandabazar on linux

I am using Linux seriously for last four years. One of the things I wanted to do on linux from the very beginning is to read my favourite bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika. I tried a lot, but my all efforts went in vein vain. People told me that you can not read Anandabazar on linux due to some font issues :(. But recently with help from Kolkata-Lug I got a work around by which I can read my favorite daily on linux. In this post, I try to give a how-to kinda description of what you need to do to read Anandabazar on linux.

First thing you need is an unicode enabled browser. And firefox is one such browser. But problem is indic scripts don't get rendered properly with firefox. To view indic scripts in firefox you need to use a different rendering engine, called pango. The default download version available on mozilla site is not built with pango. So with that version, you can't view indic scripts properly.

There are two ways to get firefox built with pango. Binaries available in fedora or ubuntu repositories are built with pango. So if you use these two distros and install firefox using yum or apt-get then chances are you'll get a pango enabled firefox. Other option is to build firefox from source yourself, though I don't have any clue on this. To check if your firefox has pango built in, input 'about:buildconfig' in your firefox address bar. Look for '--enable-pango' in configure arguments. If you see one such phrase, then you can be sure that your firefox has pango built in.

Next, you need an Unicode Bangla Font. Ankur has a good mini and precise how-to for installing Bangla fonts. But, I was not able to install the rpm from that site due to some dependency problem. So I had to opt for the good old tgz packages. The instructions are given there, and they are very straight forward indeed.

With this settings, you will be able to view most bengali sites. But unfortunately there are some *stupid* websites who don't like to follow the font specifications. They use their in-house proprietary set of fonts. Anandabazar is one among them. To get rid of this comes Padma, yet another firefox extension. Padma automatically transforms web pages that use the specified dynamic font schemes (Anandabazar is one among them) to Unicode. And once you have the unicodes, firefox is able to render them.

I was so happy to read 'Golmele Ginni' after so many days ;-)

Note: All these were done on a CentOS release 4.1 (Final) and Firefox 1.5.0.10.