Working with Bengali text in PDFs: why it breaks and how to fix it
Why Bengali conjuncts turn into boxes or broken letters in many PDF tools, and what to do when you need to extract or add Bengali text.
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Bengali is a complex script: letters combine into conjuncts, vowel signs move around the consonant, and the shapes depend on neighbouring characters. Many PDF tools handle this badly.
Adding Bengali to a PDF
A PDF tool must use a font that contains Bengali glyphs and apply shaping rules to choose the right ones. If either step is missing you get boxes, loose vowel signs or wrong conjuncts. FileDeck embeds a Bengali font and shapes the text before drawing it.
Getting text out of a Bengali PDF
- Newer PDFs use Unicode and extract cleanly.
- Older documents made with legacy fonts (such as SutonnyMJ) map letters to Latin characters, so copied text looks like gibberish. Convert the text with a font-conversion tool, or OCR the page.
- Scanned pages need OCR, which works best at 300 dpi and a straight page.