
                       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. It provides a very easy-to-use
and effective graphical interface. This experimental version of bwedit is,
by no means, a very sophisticated text editor. It nevertheless incorporates
many features commonly found in modern editors. In addition, it is capable
of converting Bengali text files to html, LaTeX and PostScript.

Functionality

The on-line help of bwedit is rather self-sufficient and it's wasteful to
repeat that documentation here. Let us, therefore, choose to be very
compact.

   * File functions: Create, load, insert (at current cursor position),
     append (at the end of the current text), save

   * Edit functions: Clear, cut, copy, paste, underline, superscript,
     subscript, change font size and slant.

   * Export functions: Export Bengali documents to HTML, LaTeX and
     PostScript.

   * Character array: The keyboard map for the Bengali alphabet can be
     optionally displayed in a separate child window. But all characters
     cannot be typed using keyboard only. The buttons below the text area
     are meant for helping the user in this regard. When the user clicks on
     one of them, the character displayed on the button is inserted at the
     current cursor position in the text area.

   * 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. You may, however, supply as many command line arguments as you
     wish. All arguments except the first one are ignored by bwedit.

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

   * bwedit allows the user to discard unsaved changes. That is, it does not
     prompt the user when an attempt is made to quit or load another file or
     ... after the text is modified. Saving the contents of the text area in
     a file is completely the responsibility of the user.

   * The hypertext displays (underline, subscript, superscript etc) can
     neither be saved nor exported. Please note that bwedit is a text editor
     and not a text processor. Why all these fancy displays then? Well, no
     good reason for them at least for the time being. In future, I wish to
     incorporate features that take care of these tags.

   * Exporting documents to HTML or LaTeX asks the user of an option:
     whether she wants to save a verbaim 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. The keyboard map window displays the non-obvious mappings.
     The mappings of digits and punctuation symbols are not shown. The
     characters & and @ are not defined in the font files. If you type them,
     you cannot see any visible effect, but these characters are inserted
     and may give rise to problems in future. Better do not use them.

Requirements

  1. The Tcl/Tk shell wish
  2. The X11 bitmap fonts available from the bwfu distribution.
  3. The TeX fonts and a style file available from the bwti distribution, if
     you want to compile the exported output in the LaTeX format.
  4. 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.

Installation

   * Check if you have Tcl/Tk. Just type wish at the shell prompt. If you
     find that something happens (apart from Command not found), you are
     ready for the show.
   * Install the X11 fonts. You may use the bourne-shell script xaddbnfonts
     provided in the distribution. To check if your X server can read the
     Bengali fonts, type

        xlsfonts | grep bengali

     This gives you a listing of 18 fonts used by bwedit.
   * Optionally install the TeX fonts and the PostScript fonts.
   * Edit bwedit which is a wish script. Change the first line according as
     where you have the wish interpreter. If you have the PostScript fonts,
     change the second line too in order to tell bwedit the name (preferably
     with full path) of the PostScript font file. (Though the bwfu
     distribution provides two fonts bnr.gsf and bnsl.gsf, only the
     first is necessary for the full functioning of bwedit's export-to-PS
     command.)
   * Add execute permission to bwedit (if it is already not there).

That's it. You are now ready to launch bwedit.

Download

By http: [http://www2.csa.iisc.ernet.in/~abhij/download/]
By ftp:  [ftp://agastya.csa.iisc.ernet.in/pub/barda/]

--------------------------------------
 1998 by Abhijit Das (abhij@csa.iisc.ernet.in). bwedit is a freeware.
Permission is hereby granted to distribute and mirror bwedit free of charge
as long as the original author gets credit and this copyright notice remains
intact.

