Tech Focus
'Bijoy' expands its horizons
Syed Tashfin Chowdhury
After meeting the local need, Ananda Computers is now expanding their horizon in the neighboring Indian software market with the latest version of their revolutionary Bangla application Bijoy.Already a pioneer in language-based font development ventures, Ananda Computers has excelled over others with Bijoy Interface and the Bijoy Keyboard. Bijoy Ekushey -- the latest version of the package -- came out on February 21, International Mother Language Day, this year. "Like Bangladesh, India also lacked a local language-based interface and such keyboards," said Mustafa Zabbar, publisher and founder of Bijoy Products. "We received a huge response from the Indian market as soon as we introduced these products there," he said. Already Bijoy products have become a market leader in northern states like Assam, Tripura and Naga. Similarity of Bangla with their local languages, have boosted the acceptability of these products. Based on the positive response, Ananda Computers started developing Hindi fonts. Jheelam HMJ the first family of Hindi font was developed in both ASCII and Unicode along with the Bijoy Keyboard layout and is expected to hit the market some time this month. "We hope to introduce a dozen Hindi font families by December this year," informed Zabbar. Zabbar felt the need to develop a Bangla interface for computers back in 1987 while publishing Ananda Patro, a weekly Bangla magazine. The company faced problems with conjunctions and typography in its early days, which they resolved with the introduction of the Bijoy Keyboard. Seventeen years later, three editions of Bijoy can be found on the market. The Bijoy Ekushey package contains the Bijoy Unicode, Bijoy XP, Bijoy 2004 Pro and the Bijoy Converter. Bijoy for Macintosh includes the Mac version of the software and Mac OS10 font families. Bijoy Ekushey contains 27 Unicode based open-type font families, while the Mac edition has 30 font families. The publisher's future plans are to create fonts in three more popular Northern Indian languages - Oriya, Punjabi and Gujarati. "If things go as planned, we want to move our focus towards Southern India by 2006 and introduce fonts in Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam and Kannada," said Zabbar. Alongside these projects, the company is also working on developing Arabic fonts.
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