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The shaping of র‍্য (as in র‍্যাব) has often been a bug with Bangla Unicode fonts. According to the Unicode specification, the sequence should be:
rya sequence
Many Bangla Keyboard softwares use an incorrect sequence, especially using U+200C (ZWNJ) instead of U+200D (ZWJ); but this normally renders correctly anyhow.

InDesign & র‌্যা Shaping

In recent versions of InDesign (Oct 2022+), there has been a Unicode Bangla problem with র‍্য (as in র‍্যাব) displaying incorrectly as র্‌যা. This seems to be a bug in Lipika, Adobe’s Indic shaping engine. Fortunately, there’s a workaround. Adobe InDesign now supports the more advanced libre shaping engine HarfBuzz. If you activate HarfBuzz, this problem will be solved. Here’s how to activate it:

  1. Download this file: HarfbuzzOverride.js
  2. Place it in your InDesign /Scripts/Script Panel folder (Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign 2022\Scripts\Scripts Panel)
  3. Restart InDesign
  4. Go to Windows > Utilities > Scripts
  5. Select the HarfBuzzOverride.js file and double-click or ‘Run Script‘ from the window’s menu
  6. Now HarfBuzz should be activated and র‍্যা render correctly.

Thanks to John Hudson and Vinod Balakrishnan for helping me find these solutions.

Jacob Thomas

A Swedish-American type designer who grew up in Bangladesh, currently living in Dhaka.

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