Krutidev to Chanakya Converter

Why Kruti Dev text cannot simply be set in Chanakya

Kruti Dev 010 and Chanakya are both pre-Unicode Hindi fonts, and both store Hindi as ordinary keyboard and Latin-1 characters. But each font assigns its own letter to each key. The key d is क in Kruti Dev and स्र in Chanakya; k is the ा sign in Kruti Dev and द्म in Chanakya. Select a Kruti Dev paragraph in Word or PageMaker and change the font to Chanakya, and भारत सरकार (Hkkjr ljdkj) turns into a row of unrelated letters. The characters themselves have to be rewritten, and that is what this converter does.

The usual case is a newsroom or press that lays out pages in Chanakya and receives matter typed in Kruti Dev: a government press note, a reporter's report from a district office, a typist's draft. The reverse, Chanakya to Kruti Dev, comes up when a story set in Chanakya has to go back to an office or a typing pool that works in Kruti Dev 010. Marathi pages are often set in Shree Lipi instead, which has a table of its own; for those, use the Shree Lipi to Unicode converter.

How the conversion works

There is no one-to-one table between the two fonts. A single Kruti Dev key can need two Chanakya characters (क is d in Kruti Dev and ·¤, a letter plus its tail, in Chanakya), conjuncts exist as one glyph in one font and as two in the other, and the reph (र् above a letter) and the short i sign (ि) sit in different places. So the converter reads the Kruti Dev text as real Hindi first, using the same table as our Krutidev to Unicode converter, and writes that Hindi out with the Chanakya table of our Chanakya to Unicode converter. You do both steps with one paste. Our tests run every line of a 45-line Kruti Dev sample through both routes, Kruti Dev → Chanakya → Unicode and Kruti Dev → Unicode, and require the same Hindi from each.

How to use it

1. Keep “Kruti Dev → Chanakya” selected and paste your Kruti Dev text into the left box.
2. Press “Copy for Word” and paste into Word, PageMaker or CorelDRAW. The Hindi arrives already set in the Chanakya font; English words and stand-alone numbers come in Arial.
3. For a whole file, use “Convert a Word file (.docx)”. Every run in a Kruti Dev or DevLys font is rewritten and set in Chanakya; English, tables, bold and page layout are kept.
4. To go the other way, choose “Chanakya → Kruti Dev”. The result is set in Kruti Dev 010.

Examples

Kruti Dev and Chanakya key differences

These are the 128 characters that both fonts use but draw as different letters. If a document shows the wrong Hindi after someone changed its font from one to the other, this is why. The table is generated from the same two character tables the converter uses. Characters that exist in only one of the fonts are not listed.

Things to check after converting

• DevLys text. DevLys 010 uses the Kruti Dev layout, so it converts here too. Runs in a DevLys font pasted from Word or in a .docx are read with DevLys's own quote marks, the same way as on our DevLys to Unicode converter.
• Numbers. Kruti Dev draws the keys 0–9 as ordinary digits, but Chanakya draws them as ०–९. So a number on its own (a date, a phone number) is kept out of the Chanakya font and pasted in Arial by “Copy for Word”; digits written inside a Hindi word use Chanakya's own digit characters. If you use “Copy text” and set everything in Chanakya yourself, numbers will show as Hindi numerals.
• Colon and visarga. Chanakya has one character for both ः and the colon, so विषय: and दुःख both use it. Converting back to Kruti Dev gives the colon form, which looks the same.
• Signs one font lacks. ॐ has no character in either font, so it stays in Unicode and is set in Mangal.
• Walkman-Chanakya. Fonts named Walkman-Chanakya 901 or 905 store Hindi the Kruti Dev way, not the Chanakya way. When you paste from Word or convert a .docx, they are recognised by name and read as Kruti Dev.
• A word converts wrongly? Send the original text and the correct Hindi to hello@kruti-dev-to-unicode.com and we will fix the rule in both directions.

Frequently Asked Questions