Friday, September 25, 2009

Linotype Bengali 1978

Linotype Bengali, which came to be the 'definitive' Bengali typeface, especially in the digital era, was developed by Linotype-Paul in the late 1970s at the request of Ananda Bazar Patrika Limited. The work began in 1978 and Ananda Bazar Patrika was first published in Linotype Bengali in digital typesetter Linotron 202 in 1981. Fiona GE Ross, who was then head of Non-Latin typography at Linotype, and the type designer Tim Holloway developed the font, aided by the consultant Dr Tarapada Mukherjee of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Ananda Bazar Patrika and the publications of the group still come out in Linotype Bengali. Ananda Bazar Patrika in its online version, which still uses Bitstream portable font resources that has stopped being developed for about five years now, employs three font files to hold all the characters in the repertoire.


A paragraph scanned from a book on the Bengali grammar published by Ananda Publishers Pvt Ltd in 1996.