SHAHIDLIPI

SHAHIDLIPI was the first Bangla (Bengali) implementation in computers that appeared in 1985 after it's inventor, Saif Shahid appeared in a BBC TV program to describe the application Fact|date=December 2007. This was followed by other BBC Radio and Bangladesh TV programsFact|date=December 2007. Ittefaq, one of Bangladeshi national newspapers, ran a front page story on Saif Shahid's SHAHIDLIPIFact|date=December 2007. According to Saif Shahid, the name, SHAHIDLIPI was derived from the national language movement myrters (known also as SHAHID in Bangla). However, the similarity with the author's name could be more than just a coincidence.

The initial versions of SHAHIDLIPI ran on graphics based Apple Macintosh computers. Later a Windows based version was also released in the market. By 1988, most government and private organizations in Bangladesh were using SHAHIDLIPI in their Bangla computer applications.

From the preface in the SHAHIDLIPI manual, it is seen that Saif Shahid has taken a conscious decision not to follow the existing Bangla typewriter keyboard. Instead he decided to follow a new keyboard which had kept similarities with existing Qwerty keyboards, thus making it easy for people used to that keyboard to switch easily to the Bangla SHAHIDLIPI keyboard.

Saif Shahid and his development team in Beximco Computers Limited developed several TrueType and screen fonts - namely Jessore, Dhaka, Faridpur, Bhola, Lalmonirhat, Chittagong, Sylhet, etc. Many later fonts marketed by other competitors have shown resemblance with these original developments. Ashraf, Alam and Rashid are a few of the original graphic artists who worked with Saif Shahid.

Besides the Bangla fonts, the original SHAHIDLIPI also completely localized the operating system in Bangla with all the alert messages and menu items converted to Bangla. It may be mentioned here that this conversion was done long before any localization kits were available in the market.

(SHAHIDLIPI can also be written as ShahidLipi or Shahid Lipi)

References

* http://banglapedia.search.com.bd/HT/S_0449.htm
* http://www.ektaonline.org/~digitalb/banglapedia_en.html
* http://www.geocities.com/ajmakkas/infor3.html