Thank you OmicronLab, for your informative post. I have to admit, being brought up in the west, my Bangla is not so good and there are many like me who have not studied Bangla beyond primary level.

The explosion of telephone/e-mail/internet means I rarely use written Bangla anymore. One of the barriers has been the interface to writing in Bangla.

Before the advent of Unicode, there had been so many different methods and the lack of interoperability was a major factor in staying away from it! Even with the standardisation that came with Unicode, I've still not taken it on board but will certainly try out the Avro Keyboard method.

However, the next obstacle is likely to be speed. I can touch-type English at around 30-40 wpm. If I want to write in Bangla, that will come down to, maybe, around 5-10 wpm with a higher error ratio. Please focus some of your research on this area which will allow you to capture a greater number of users.

Another problem I find is spelling!! Because I haven't studied Bangla, I can never get the spellings right. When should I use a jonthosh-sha instead of talibosh-sha (for example). An integrated spell checker into the keyboard would provide a much needed feature across all applications that the keyboard can be used on rather than relying on the applications have a spell checker.