Regional Arab World Font Converter — 100% Secure & Private.
ASMO-708 is a legacy encoding used for Arab World regional script typing. Because it maps characters to standard keyboard keys rather than Unicode positions, this tool is required to convert ASMO-708 text into modern Unicode for web display and digital publishing.
Our ASMO-708 font converter runs entirely in your browser. None of the text you type or convert is sent to any server. This makes it perfect for private document processing and ensures zero data leaks.
Paste your ASMO-708 text into the source input area.
The tool will instantly convert it to standard Unicode below.
Click 'Copy Result' to use the Unicode text anywhere online.
Use the Vicerversa (Swap) button to convert from Unicode back to ASMO-708.
Encoding Engine
Our high-performance engine uses a two-pass mapping system to resolve character swaps and script-specific vowel reordering rules, ensuring that your text remains linguistically accurate after conversion.
Unicode is the industry standard for consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text across most of the world's writing systems. Legacy fonts like ASMO-708 were designed before Unicode adoption.
Convert legacy ASMO-708 and ISO 8859-6 Arabic text encodings into modern, universally supported Arabic Unicode. Critical for migrating old Middle Eastern archives.
In the early days of personal computing in the Arab world, standardizing the complex Arabic script was a massive engineering challenge. Before the global adoption of Unicode, regional organizations developed 8-bit character sets to display Arabic on computers. ASMO-708 (developed by the Arab State Broadcasting Union) and its international counterpart, ISO 8859-6, were the dominant standards. While groundbreaking at the time, these legacy encodings are completely incompatible with modern systems. If you open an old ASMO-encoded document today, you will likely see a garbled mess of accented Latin characters or question marks instead of elegant Arabic calligraphy. The ASMO-708 to Unicode Converter mathematically rescues this data, mapping the old 8-bit values to their permanent, modern Arabic Unicode counterparts.
Before Unicode provided a massive coordinate space for every language on Earth, computers were limited to 8-bit "code pages" (allowing only 256 characters). The lower 128 characters were reserved for standard English ASCII, and the upper 128 characters were swapped out depending on the region.
ASMO-708 mapped the upper range (specifically `0xC1` to `0xEA`) to the Arabic alphabet. This worked fine on older DOS or Windows 95 machines configured for the Middle East, but if you transferred the file to a European computer, it would interpret those exact same bytes as French or German accented letters (producing Mojibake).
Arabic is a cursive script that is written from right to left. Many very early systems used "visual encoding," meaning the typist literally typed characters backwards and manually selected contextual shapes (isolated, initial, medial, final). Fortunately, ASMO-708 was mostly a logical encoding, meaning it stored the abstract letters in reading order and relied on the operating system's rendering engine to shape the cursive connections.
Our converter engine reads the raw input stream and maps the legacy ASCII/Extended-ASCII keystrokes directly to the standard `U+0600` Arabic Unicode block, ensuring that modern shaping engines (like CoreText or HarfBuzz) can perfectly render the beautiful cursive connections.
Below is a sample of the internal translation matrix our engine uses to map the legacy PC Arabic keyboard layout to standard Unicode.
| English Key | Target Arabic Unicode | Character Name | Unicode Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| h | ا | Arabic Letter Alef | U+0627 |
| f | ب | Arabic Letter Beh | U+0628 |
| j | ت | Arabic Letter Teh | U+062A |
| g | ل | Arabic Letter Lam | U+0644 |
| v | ر | Arabic Letter Reh | U+0631 |
| k | ن | Arabic Letter Noon | U+0646 |
To convert your broken documents, simply open the raw text file (or copy the text from your legacy software) and paste it into the converter. Ensure you are copying the raw text characters, not the font styling.
Because you are likely dealing with Right-to-Left (RTL) text, modern browsers will automatically align the output correctly once it hits the Unicode standard. You can safely copy the output (`مرحبا`) and paste it into WhatsApp, modern Microsoft Word, or a web database without losing data.
If you manage an archival database, a library system, or an older Middle Eastern website, you cannot rely on legacy encodings. Modern search engines like Google exclusively crawl and index Unicode (UTF-8). If your database is returning ASMO-encoded strings, Google will index it as random ASCII gibberish, utterly destroying your SEO visibility.
Running your legacy SQL dumps or XML archives through this converter is a mandatory step in digitizing and preserving Arabic cultural and historical records for the modern internet.
Quick answers to common questions about this utility.
Yes. While legacy systems required complex hacks to manage RTL formatting, modern Unicode handles bidirectional text seamlessly. Once your text is converted to Unicode, modern browsers and operating systems will automatically flow the Arabic script from right to left.
Yes, our converter supports bidirectional toggling. If you are a developer working on a retro-computing project or need to interface with an obsolete mainframe in the Middle East, you can revert modern Arabic text back to the legacy 8-bit codepage.
Our engine is specifically designed to target the mapped characters. Standard ASCII English characters and numbers (which occupy the lower 128 bit space) are left intact during the conversion, preserving any English loan words or standard digits within your Arabic text.
