Regional Font Converters

Before Unicode became the global standard, people around the world typed regional scripts using legacy ASCII-based font systems. These systems worked by mapping regional characters to standard English keyboard positions, which was fine for printing but created a major problem for the modern internet. Text created in these fonts shows up as unreadable characters on any device that does not have the specific font installed. Our Regional Font Converter suite solves this problem for over 20 script systems across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

South Asian Script Converters

For Nepali text, our suite covers the most widely used legacy fonts including Preeti, Kantipur, Kalimati, Sagarmatha, and Himali. These fonts were standard in Nepali government documents, newspapers, and publications for over two decades. Enormous archives of digitized content remain locked in these formats and require conversion to become usable on modern web and mobile platforms.

For Hindi and North Indian scripts, Kruti Dev and Devlys converters handle Devanagari-based legacy encoding used extensively in government offices and examination systems across India. Tamil Bamini, Bengali Bijoy, and Sinhala font converters address similar challenges across the broader South Asian region.

Southeast Asian Font Converters

Zawgyi is the dominant legacy encoding for Burmese language content in Myanmar. Despite the availability of standard Unicode Burmese fonts, Zawgyi remains widespread on older devices and platforms across the region. Our Zawgyi to Unicode converter properly encodes Burmese text for modern web, messaging apps, and database storage.

InPage, the primary publishing tool for Urdu, Persian, and Sindhi on older systems, is also supported with a dedicated conversion tool. Thai TIS-620, Khmer Limon, and Lao Saysettha converters address similar legacy challenges across mainland Southeast Asia, covering the full range of regional script needs for this part of the world. Unicode standardization is managed by the Unicode Consortium.

Retro and Mainframe Encodings

For technology historians and data migration specialists, we provide converters for EBCDIC (IBM mainframe encoding), PETSCII (Commodore 64 character set), and ATASCII (Atari computer encoding). These tools are used for archival data recovery, academic research, and digital preservation projects where legacy data needs to be made readable on modern systems.

How Font Conversion Works

Legacy font converters read each character as a keyboard code point and map it to the correct Unicode character for that script. Simple scripts need simple one-to-one mappings. Complex scripts like Devanagari need context-aware reordering because vowels in the legacy encoding often appear before the consonants they follow phonetically, which is the opposite of how they must be stored in Unicode.

Our conversion engine handles these reordering rules automatically, producing Unicode output that renders correctly in all modern browsers and operating systems without any special font installation needed on the recipient's device.