bwedit - A Bengali text editor

Welcome to the experimental Bengali text editor bwedit. It runs on any X11 window system having the Tcl/Tk shell wish.

Features and functionality

GUI: The graphical interface is very easy-to-use and effective.
Character buttons: There is no need to remember character maps for the huge unmanagable Bengali alphabet. Click on the character buttons below the editor text area to insert these characters at the current cursor position.
Import Roman text: If you choose, you may write romanized Bengali (7 bit ASCII). If you follow a set of simple rules, bwedit can convert the transliterated text to Bengali - on-line. The rules are simple, at least I think so!
Export facilities: You can generate HTML, LaTeX and PostScript files from Bengali text files.
Tags: Select text and change the display style of the selected text to subscript, superscript, underlined text ... You can insert Roman characters (and characters corresponding to any X font you have) anywhere in the editor text. These tags can be saved and exported making bwedit (almost) WYSIWYG.
Mail facilities: bwedit gives you facilities to send Bengali documents (Bengali text or transliterated ascii text) through e-mail. Since Bengali documents may contain 8-bit data, encoding of this to 7-bit ASCII is necessary. In addition to the built-in encoder, bwedit provides interface to MIME- and uu- encoding techniques. bwedit does not automatically read one's mailbox. It can, however, read, decode and show encoded text.
Configuration: You may configure bwedit in a variety of ways. You may change colors, window size, default font size and so on. You may even customize the Roman-to-Bengali encoding scheme to define an encoding that suits you better.
Help: bwedit comes with extensive on-line help.
First? To the best of my knowledge, bwedit is the first software of its kind.
Free!! And bwedit is free for personal use. Feel free to distribute bwedit to your friends.

bwedit has evolved to be a rather sophisticated text editor. I still refrain from calling it a text processor. Yes, I think a text processor should at the minimum be capable of doing automatic right justification. Alas! bwedit cannot do that!

The current version of bwedit is 1.4.

Command line

You may call bwedit as

   bwedit

or as

   bwedit <filename>

If <filename> exists, it is displayed and, if not, a new one is created. If <filename> exists, bwedit interpretes an optional second argument as the file name to load the tags for the editor text.

   bwedit <filename> <tagfilename>

You may, however, supply as many command line arguments as you wish. All arguments except the first one (and the second and the third, if the situation demands them) are ignored by bwedit.

Limitations

Now that we have seen what bwedit can do, let us see what it cannot.

The current version of bwedit can not export underlined text.
If the editor text is tagged with a general X font, the export funcion treats the text as if it is written in ASCII ISO-Latin encoding.
Exporting documents to HTML or LaTeX asks the user of an option: whether she wants to save a verbatim copy of the text, that is, whether she wants to get an output that is formatted exactly the way the input is. If this option is not selected, the only formatting that bwedit understands is a paragraph break for a blank line. Exporting to PostScript, on the other hand, is in the verbatim mode only.
All consonants, all vowel forms, two vowels (the first (a) and the last (ou)), all digits and punctuation symbols can be typed from the keyboard. Other symbols (mostly the conjunct consonants) cannot be printed using key board. You must use the left button of your mouse to insert them.

Requirements

The Tcl/Tk shell wish (bwedit has been tested to work well with Tcl8.0/Tk8.0. For earlier versions (Tcl7.6/Tk4.2 etc.), certain keyboard bindings have been found to create some trouble.)
The X11 bitmap fonts available from the bwfu distribution.
The TeX fonts and a style file available from the bwti distribution, if you want to compile the exported output in the LaTeX format.
The PostScript Type 1 fonts available from the bwfu distribution, for exporting Bengali documents to PostScript files.

The first two are absolutely necessary for bwedit to work. The others are optional and needed if you want to export Bengali documents in the desired format. Neither of these softwares is bundled with bwedit. They can be obtained separately.

Changes in Version 1.1

A bug related to window resizing has been fixed.
Facility for customizing (and saving) various options is included.
An on-line Roman-to-Bengali converter is introduced. An editor for Roman text is also incorporated.
Error messages are added.
Extensive on-line documentation is added.

Changes in Version 1.2

Lots of tags are added (script tags like supersuperscript etc., tags for displaying text in the `fixed' font and in any arbitrary X font available in the system).
Facility for saving and loading tags is introduced.
The export functions have been thoroughly rewritten so that they can respect the tags.
Facility to prompt the user when she wants to discard unsaved changes in the text area is incorporated.
New bindings have been defined for the middle and right buttons of the mouse.

Changes in Version 1.3

The on-line display below the text area of the `Edit transliterated text' window is added.
Facility for importing text directly from the `Edit transliterated text' window is incorporated.
The toolbar for the `Edit transliterated text' window is redesigned.
Facility to prompt the user when she wants to discard unsaved changes in the text area of the `Edit transliterated text' window is introduced.
Some diagnostic messages are added (for example, when a file or options are saved).

Changes in Version 1.4

A bug related to the window resizing of the `Edit transliterated text' window has been fixed.
Two more bugs related to the `Save confirm' windows are fixed.
A bug in setting the dirty bit is also fixed.
A bug related to not refreshing the on-line view in the transliterator window during load etc. is fixed.
Another bug related to the existence of spaces in a file name etc. is also removed.
Compatibility with bwti version 3.0 and bwfu version 1.1 is incorporated.
Two new conjunct consonants are added.
The character array is a little bit beautified.
In all the previous versions, when a user wants to re-open an auxiliary window, she gets an error message. This is taken into account in this version. A re-open request now changes the focus to the existing window.
Facility to send Bengali documents through e-mail is introduced. The associated 8-bit to 7-bit encoding routines and the corresponding decoding routines are added.
Cut-copy-paste facilities are introduced for the transliterator window. An old bug for these operations has also been fixed.
For export to LaTeX and HTML, the user is provided an option to include or omit the header and tailer. For LaTeX this is particularly useful. If the user opts to omit the header, the output LaTeX file ceases to be a self-sufficient LaTeX input; instead one can readily \input or \include the file from another LaTeX source.
For export to PS, a target page selector is introduced.
The option editor is modified. In particular, the `edit option' windows for the main window, the transliterator window and the mail operations are integrated into a single window. Switching between different option topics is made possible through radio buttons.

Download

By http

By ftp

Note: Versions 1.3 and below of bwedit are compatible with bwfu fonts version 1.0 and METAFONT files version 2.1. If you download version 1.4 onwards of bwedit, you should download version 1.1 of bwfu and version 3.0 of bwti. If you have already downloaded the older version of the fonts and want to install the new version of bwedit, I request you to reinstall the Bengali fonts. Any inconvenience arising out of this is regretted.

[My home page] [bwti page] [bwfu page]

© 1998 by Abhijit Das (abhij@csa.iisc.ernet.in). Permission is hereby granted to distribute bwedit free of charge as long as the original author gets credit and this copyright notice remains intact. Use of this software for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited.