Thanks to Sayam and his dad for digging out an old book and sending it across in reply to the RFC call for bug 247233.
As per an extract from this document, the symbol looks best to be positioned as below:
The above reference is from the book titled Bangiya Shabdakosh by Haricharan Bandopadhyay published by the Shahitya Akademi. Right now Sayam is gathering a copy of the complete three volume set in Kolkata.
A bug related to the positioning of the ৺ (Isshar sign – U+09FA) was fixed by Rahul today after quite a bit of research by Amitakhya and me. The character was being positioned at-level with the other alphabets:
As far as everyone could remember, the dot within the sign would have to be at level with the matra – the horizontal bar on top of the alpbhabet, looking like this:
According to the Chalantika written by Rajshekhar Basu, this sign is used as a prefix for the following:
1. Name of a deceased person (শ্রী শ্রীমতি শ্রীযুক্ত etc. are used for living people)
2. Name of a deity
3. Name of a holy place
dd told me earlier that, since it was used mainly by printers there had been no standardization. That compounded the problem. It would be great to have an RFC on this matter. As of now the current positioning looks perfect in conjunction to all the shraddha chiti (শ্রাদ্ধ চিঠি) that I have seen over time.
Anyways, moving from the morbidness surrounding this entire symbol, its good to see so much activity happening with the Lohit fonts thats very much part of the Fedora Indic locales. It holds a special place in my heart because… I named them (shamless plug) 3 years back! 😀
Fedora Project has thrown open the Lohit Fonts Project. Details are available at the wiki page and the mailing list is at : lohit-devel-list@redhat.com. So if you are interested.. plunge right ahead. 🙂
Another piece of information seems to have gone missing with the randomink.org crash. Bengali India (bn-IN) Language Packs for Firefox 1.0.x and 1.5.0.x are available respectively here and here. To use these language packs first you would need to install the Language Switcher available here. Next, download the relevent language pack from any of the two links above and save it on your local machine. Next open the .xpi file from the File menu i.e. File->Open File… Once installed you would need to choose the language from Tools->Languages. All set to go now.
Through Myopic Eyes 
