Use Cases
For the vast majority of Bengali speakers, typing on fixed Bengali keyboard layouts (like Probhat or Jatiya) on a mobile screen is slow and cumbersome. Avro Phonetic typing (Romanized transliteration) has become the de facto standard for digital Bengali communication. Users need the ability to type phonetic English (e.g., typing "ami banglay gan gai") and have the keyboard automatically transliterate it into Bengali script ("আমি বাংলায় গান গাই") on the fly.
Without phonetic support, many Bengali users cannot practically migrate to FUTO Keyboard as their daily driver.
Proposal
Implement an Avro Phonetic input mode. Because Avro relies on sequential character mapping and automatic vowel-forming algorithms (e.g., handling complex conjuncts/juktakkhor when specific consonants are typed together), this cannot be achieved purely through the existing YAML static layout system.
The implementation would require:
A standard QWERTY-based visual layout that flags the engine to use phonetic parsing.
Core input logic to parse incoming phonetic English strings and output the corresponding Unicode Bengali script.
Integration of open-source Bengali phonetic mapping rules.
References
OmicronLab Avro Source: https://github.com/omicronlab
Awesome Bangla (Libraries & Parsers): https://github.com/banglakit/awesome-bangla
Use Cases
For the vast majority of Bengali speakers, typing on fixed Bengali keyboard layouts (like Probhat or Jatiya) on a mobile screen is slow and cumbersome. Avro Phonetic typing (Romanized transliteration) has become the de facto standard for digital Bengali communication. Users need the ability to type phonetic English (e.g., typing "ami banglay gan gai") and have the keyboard automatically transliterate it into Bengali script ("আমি বাংলায় গান গাই") on the fly.
Without phonetic support, many Bengali users cannot practically migrate to FUTO Keyboard as their daily driver.
Proposal
Implement an Avro Phonetic input mode. Because Avro relies on sequential character mapping and automatic vowel-forming algorithms (e.g., handling complex conjuncts/juktakkhor when specific consonants are typed together), this cannot be achieved purely through the existing YAML static layout system.
The implementation would require:
A standard QWERTY-based visual layout that flags the engine to use phonetic parsing.
Core input logic to parse incoming phonetic English strings and output the corresponding Unicode Bengali script.
Integration of open-source Bengali phonetic mapping rules.
References
OmicronLab Avro Source: https://github.com/omicronlab
Awesome Bangla (Libraries & Parsers): https://github.com/banglakit/awesome-bangla