For 40 years, Bengali newspapers were printed with letters cut down to fit a machine. In 1978 one of them asked a young Sanskrit scholar in England to fix that. In 1938, Anandabazar Patrika's proprietor, Suresh Chandra Majumdar, spent years with America's Mergenthaler Linotype to mechanise Bengali for fast newspaper printing. The result, Linotype Bengali No. 2, was a feat. But hot metal forced hard compromises. Conjunct letters could not be stacked properly, graceful forms were flattened, and the whole script was squeezed into 90 glyphs. 40 years later, in 1978, Anandabazar went digital. It bought the Linotron 202, a phototypesetter that drew letters from outlines stored on magnetic tape, and asked Linotype's British arm for a Bengali font in two weights. The job went to a young research assistant, Fiona Ross, who held a postgrad diploma in Sanskrit. She went back to old Bengali manuscripts and printed books, including an 18th century manuscript at the British Library, and brought back letters the machines had killed. Tim Holloway drew them. Anandabazar staff and Dr Tarapada Mukherjee at SOAS, London, checked the glyphs before digitisation in Frankfurt. The new font had over 300 glyphs. Every character had to fit a grid of 54 units. Then the harder problem.... A keyboard has about a 100 keys, but Bengali has 1,000s of conjuncts. So Ross and Dr Mike Fellows built a phonetic keyboard. You type the way a word sounds, and Fellows' software assembles the conjunct. Linotype never patented it... India adopted it, and Ross has written that it became the blueprint for keyboards in other Indian scripts. The light weight went into use at Anandabazar in spring 1981. Linotype stopped making the font in the early 1990s, but Indian companies had copied it so widely that one vendor said pirated users outnumbered his licensed ones three to one. Sources: Riccardo Olocco, MATD essay, University of Reading; Fiona Ross, The Printed Bengali Character and Its Evolution (1999). Photo: Linotype UK's Type Design Department, Cheltenham, 1983, with letterform drawings on the wall.