Avro Keyboard

Avro Keyboard (Bengali: অভ্র কী-বোর্ড) is a free and open-source, graphical keyboard layout changer for the Microsoft Windows operating system, Ubuntu and other flavours of Linux. It is the first free Unicode- and ANSI-compliant Bengali keyboard interface for Windows that was published on 26 March 2003. Avro has support for fixed keyboard layout and its own phonetic (type Bengali through its romanized transliteration) layout. Assamese language can be written too. The software has a keyboard layout editor, a portable edition and various tools and fonts.

Development of Avro Keyboard was started in 2003 by Dr. Mehdi Hasan Khan, a student from Mymensingh Medical College. It was first published on web for free download on 26 March 2003 under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Initially, it was developed in Visual Basic, which was later transferred to Delphi. The Linux version of it was written in C++. Avro was further developed by M. M. Rifat-Un-Nabi, Tanbin Islam Siyam, Ryan Kamal, Shabab Mustafa and Nipon Haque from OmicronLab. The latest stable version of Avro Keyboard is 5.5.0 which was released on 21 February 2014. Avro phonetic for Linux is available with source code. After discussion, OmicronLab published the source code of windows version under MPL 1.1 license with the Avro Keyboard 5.0.5 public beta 1.