Evolution of Digital Bengali Typeface & Development of Bengali Typeface Somoyer Srot
Evolution of Digital Bengali Typeface & Development of Bengali Typeface Somoyer Srot
This Report Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
of Bachelor of Science in Multimedia and Creative Technology.
Supervised By
BOARD OF EXAMINERS
I hereby declare that this project has been done by us under the supervision of Mizanur
Rahman Ashik, Lecturer, Department of MCT Daffodil International University. I also
declare that neither this project nor any part of this project has been submitted elsewhere for
the award of any degree or diploma.
Supervised by:
Submitted by:
At first, particularly we are thankful to the Almighty Allah for blessing us and enabling to
complete this Project paper. Designing Bengali Typeface is a very painstaking and time-
consuming task and attending a project like this leaves us with a store of knowledge. This type
of project will help us to contribute more to the Bengali Language. I’m thankful to my project
coordinator. He has been guiding me on this project for a bit long time with his experience so
well that we can understand very easily and get proper bits of knowledge on Type Design.
Typography design is a very important course for Multimedia students.
I am really grateful and wish my profound indebtedness to Mizanur Rahman Ashik, Lecturer,
Department of MCT Daffodil International University, Dhaka. Deep Knowledge & keen
interest of our supervisor in the field of “Typography Design” to carry out this project. His
endless patience, scholarly guidance, continual encouragement, constant and energetic
supervision, constructive criticism, valuable advice, reading many inferior drafts and correcting
them at all stage have made it possible to complete this project.
I would like to thank Bengali Type Designers around the world for their contribution toward
this language. At last, we would like to thank our classmates. Many of our friends and also
many well-wishers contributed ideas and made suggestions that greatly enhanced this research
report. We would like to thank them as well. At the last but not least, we are also very thankful
to the Internet which was very supportive and grateful medium for completing this research
report. Where this research report succeeds we share the credit, where it errors we all accept
the responsibilities.
I am grateful for the support I have received throughout this project. In particular the staff of
the Department of Multimedia & Creative Technology, Daffodil International University. Then
I need to thank: Thouhedul Islam Himel, Jabed Bhuiyan, Abrar Ulsy, Mohammad
Nazimuddoula, Niladri Shekhar Bala (India), Biman Chand Mullick (UK), Jyotish
Sanal(Canada), Kaushik De (Magneto Digital), Riyad Shahir Ahmed Husain (Magneto
Digital), Akif Ahmed (Mindscape Communication)
In this project, I have created multiple numbers of Bengali Typeface for the coming generation
of Bengali designer & type enthusiast. My work is highly based on solid design principle and
aesthetics at first modality. My goal was to create quality designer Bengali Font which can be
implemented in graphic & communication design. This paper also investigates the reason
behind why there are only a few numbers of Bengali typeface where there is a million English.
It also focuses on the making of Somoyer Srot Typeface and the development procedure of a
Bengali font and experience while doing it. This report also tried to find how today’s market
leader Bengali Writing tools got their place & also how they share responsibilities to change
the scenario. An overview is provided of Current Bengali Typefaces that have been produced
recently.
APPROVAL ........................................................................................................................................... ii
Declaration ............................................................................................................................................. iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENT........................................................................................................................ iv
Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... v
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................... vi
Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................................................. 1
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................................. 3
Research and Studies .......................................................................................................................... 3
2.1. The History: ............................................................................................................................. 3
2.2. The Great Bengal: .................................................................................................................... 3
2.3. The Anatomy: .......................................................................................................................... 4
2.4. Bengali Script: An Overview ................................................................................................... 5
2.5. Consonant Conjunct ................................................................................................................. 6
2.6.Birth of a ligature ...................................................................................................................... 7
2.7. Evolution of Bengali Script.................................................................................................... 10
Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................................................... 12
Project Workflow .............................................................................................................................. 12
3.1. Software: ................................................................................................................................ 12
3.1.1. Adobe Illustrator ................................................................................................................. 12
3.1.2. Fontlab Studio ..................................................................................................................... 12
3.2. Project Approach.................................................................................................................... 13
3.3. Design Process ....................................................................................................................... 13
3.4.Stages in Design ...................................................................................................................... 16
Chapter 4 ............................................................................................................................................... 19
Preview of the work .......................................................................................................................... 19
4.1 Somoyer Srot .......................................................................................................................... 19
4.2 Nondon.................................................................................................................................... 28
Chapter 5 ............................................................................................................................................... 37
Usage ................................................................................................................................................ 37
5.1. Practical Implementation of Somoyer Srot: ........................................................................... 37
5.2. Practical Usage of Somoyer Srot: .......................................................................................... 37
5.3. Practical usage of Nondon ..................................................................................................... 43
Chapter 6 ............................................................................................................................................... 44
Analysis ............................................................................................................................................ 44
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 47
References ............................................................................................................................................. 49
Bibilography ......................................................................................................................................... 49
Typography, a craft traditionally practiced by specialists, is now widespread due to the advent
of the information age and digital tools. This explosion of text communication has created a
need for quality typefaces. In adapting to these technologies that evolved for Latin script, Indic
scripts as with many other non-Latin scripts, have an added complexity.
Given the Bangla diversity, this explosion and the rapidly growing traditional media, television,
newspaper, and magazines, has caused a more urgent and pressing need for quality typefaces
and language support for the diversity of scripts.
During my course of Typography Design, I had an opportunity of working under the guidance
of Mr. Mizanur Rahman Ashik. During this time I created a typeface using graph paper &
digital methods. Not only did I gain an understanding of the type design process with and
without involving software, but I also understood the same for different scripts. It was a starting
point.
It was a grief that got me interested in doing typeface design. While exploring Dhaka &
different part of the country, I see countless examples of bad typography especially Bangla
typography on the shop sign, book cover, packaging, ads design & more. I always thought I
can make these things better. Besides the great sacrifice of our martyrs of language movement,
culture, and colors of Bangla that have always drawn me. Working on Somoyer Srot was a
great opportunity to harvest a pool of inspiration.
"To provide a choice for better design."
To gain language support with the existing technologies, the advent of open-type, overflow and
easy availability of digital tools -typography is required to scale up and meet the technological
constraints.
When one looks up for fonts in English, there are thousands, but it is not the same for Bengali
scripts. There's a compromise on typography almost every time a logo needs to be made
bilingual, simply because of the lack of fonts. The only way to have some kind of visual
presentation to support language diversity is to take this forward and provide a choice of fonts
for the designers to choose from, making the design process more efficient.
Finally, I’ve appended an investigation into Bengali typesetting on personal computers at the
present time, as its limits will help us to grasp a more precise picture of the current situation of
Bengali typography.
Figure1: The regions were Bengali is the official script. In the Indian states of Meghalaya,
Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh Bengali are used along with other scripts, mainly Latin.
Given this, the traditional communicators like design agencies and graphic designers generally
work with layouts in English, while the Indic scripts are the prerogative of publishing
companies for setting books, magazines, and newspapers. This chapter focuses on the
implications of typesetting a Bengali text on a personal computer, analyzing the technology
involved and its many problems, the strategies developed by local people and the services
developed by Local software companies to address those weaknesses.
2.6.Birth of a ligature
In the days of movable type (early 19th c.), printing the diacritic of U provided a small
challenge - it offset the following letter in some cases. Especially in the case of Sha and Ga,
which often combine with U in words.
As it expended more space, added to the ink cost and caused legibility issues at the same time,
the printers sought a way to get past the problem. They came up with unique ligatures for Shu
and Gu, which addressed the spacing issue, and did so at a lower cost.
Thus, a ligature was born.
Tail Arabic [14], Latin A stroke comes out from main letter part
উইঈ
[9] individually. Most of the Ascender is Tail
ঐ
in Bengali.
3.1. Software:
Though Typeface development is an insanely complex task in case of technicality, the entire
process used only two software.
Grid tool, pen tool, corner tool, shape tool is the things that helped me to develop a vector
version of my design.
Stage 1: In this stage, I’ve prepared grid setting like the following. This will be my canvas on
the entire workflow. To set up this preferred grid, I went to Adobe Illustrator Preference
Setting and went further to Guides & grid setting, Setting is like following, Gridline Every:
10points, Number of Gridline: 10. The grid will look like this,
Stage 2: In this stage, I blocked out character with the basic geometric shape. Point to be
noted that all these shapes are aligned to the gridline.
Figure 21: Visual Perception of Uniform round corner around the design
Script Feature:
Digital Marketing Industry got a revolutionary hit after 2012. Every brand is working hard to
push their brand & product in front of a respective audience. A potential audience’s eye only
stops for 3 seconds to watch a content. So a marketer’s mission is to develop eye-catching
content so that people dive into it more. From a designer’s perspective, a good design must
have a good typography in it. Good typography is all about a pretty typeface. This is the
moment when the importance of new typeface come in the table.
Despite having thousands of English font, there are only a few numbers of Indic font available
on the web. This number is not more than 50, where Bengali is 7th most popular language in
the world with more than 250 million spoken people.
In Bangladeshi, most of the fonts we use in our day to day needs has been developed by Ananda
Computers, the company which is behind the popular Type Tool Bijoy Bangla. Other than
Bijoy some independent type designer had come forward to design a quality typeface in
Bengali. To some extent, I’m highly motivated by some of them.
Most of the fonts Bijoy Developed are usually ANSI which are not compliant with the global
standard of Unicode consortium. Most of the typeface Bijoy developed has hundreds of Bugs
inside them. Almost every font has a kerning issue, alignment issue.
When developing the font I tried my most to mitigate these sort of issues.
In the development stage, I followed this gridline strictly to avoid this issue. This grid helped
me a lot in translating vector designs to FontLab, by pasting at the exact same position.
Figure 38: Side by side comparison of Popular Bijoy font, Kongsho & Somoyer srot.
A significant difference is visible on the figure. Fonts developed by Bijoy has many
unnecessary points on the vector path that spoils the smoothness of the font. I tried to use as
less point as possible.
Through this process, there has been a reduction of the traditional handwritten qualities that
were once visible in the first metal types a feature that only ever occurred with a small selection
of characters. the Bengali characters are very much of a mono-linear fashion a characteristic
which had been predominantly visible in the handwritten manuscripts and is in existence in the
contemporary digital format. one is still unclear with regards to which tool and method had
been utilized yet with further investigation one would hope to decipher this so that the transition
between paper and screen could be understood a little more. technology has evolved immensely
over the past four centuries yet it has not had a great effect upon the design of the Bengali
script. it seems to have steadily evolved between each transition improving the typesetting at
each point.
This writing plan of this paper came in mind more than two years ago. From the very beginning,
I had some specific points in my head about this paper. I was determined that I will write those
things one day. According to the academic rules, there is a little linguistic change in my
thoughts and experience, but I’m very happy that I was able to cover my entire experience with
Bengali font in this paper. But I was relieved of one thing - no matter how plan I made, I had
to hurry. I thought I would add a lot - but I did not. On the other hand, I did not think of many
things but somehow it came here!
I love Typography especially Bengali Typography. I do not know how quality my work is, but
I love what I do. I have a lot of limitations, I know that many times I just tried to overcome this
with my passion. Those who are around me know this, they also support me. It's not too much
of authorship to discuss this whole mythological story. Actually, I did not read many big books,
I did not sit in the library every day. Here is my opinion, my belief, my experience. As it is, I
know there are inconsistencies, excessive emotional expression - there is such error.
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