Shree Lipi to Unicode Converter

What is Shree Lipi?

Shree Lipi is a family of Devanagari fonts and typing software from Modular Infotech of Pune, made long before Unicode. It is common in Marathi DTP work: newspaper and magazine pages, books and office printing laid out in PageMaker, CorelDRAW or QuarkXPress. A Shree Lipi file does not contain Marathi letters. It contains characters like _, m and R>, and the Shree font draws each one as part of a Devanagari letter. Without the font, मराठी shows up as _amR>r.

Converting to Unicode replaces those characters with real Marathi letters, so the text can be posted on a website, sent on WhatsApp, searched in Google or typed into a government portal, none of which know the Shree fonts. The reverse, Unicode to Shree Lipi, is for layout: Marathi typed on a phone or in Google Docs has to be turned back into Shree characters before it can be placed in a page that uses the Shree font.

Which Shree font is your text in?

Shree Lipi is not one font but dozens, and they do not all use the same characters. Check the font name in Word (or in PageMaker's character panel) and find it below. We only list a font as supported after checking it.

If your file uses a font marked “not supported”, the result will have wrong letters. Email a short sample and the font name to hello@kruti-dev-to-unicode.com; a sample is what we need to check a new font. Nepali documents are usually in Preeti, a different font again: use the Preeti to Unicode converter for them.

How the conversion works

• Letters and their tails. Many Shree letters are drawn from two characters: H$ is क, where $ is the right-hand tail; Q> is ट. The tails carry no letter of their own and are dropped.
• The short i (ि) comes first. In Shree text { (or [) is typed before its letter, as it is drawn. In Unicode it comes after the letter, so it is moved: {d = वि.
• Reph comes last. The र् drawn above a letter (as in कार्य) is ©, typed after its syllable. Some Shree characters combine it with a vowel sign, such as u for ी plus reph in कीर्ती.
• Digits. The keys 0–9 draw Marathi digits ०–९ in Shree fonts, so they become ०–९ in Unicode.
• Marathi letters. ळ (i), the half र in दुसऱ्या (è), ॲ and ऑ are all handled.

How to use it

1. Choose “Shree Lipi → Unicode” and paste the Shree text into the left box. The Unicode Marathi appears on the right.
2. Copy it, or download it as a Word document set in Mangal.
3. For a whole Word file, use “Convert a Word file (.docx)”. Only text set in SHREE-DEV-0714 is changed; English headings, tables and bold are kept.
4. To go the other way, choose “Unicode → Shree Lipi”, paste Unicode Marathi and press “Copy for Word”. The Marathi is pasted in SHREE-DEV-0714 and English words in Arial.

Examples

Shree Lipi and Unicode compared

SHREE-DEV-0714 character chart

Every single character the converter recognises, with the Unicode it becomes. The left column is what you see when the font is not installed. Pairs such as Am (आ) and B© (ई) are handled too but not listed.

If the result looks wrong

• Many letters are wrong, not just a few: the text is probably in another Shree font, not SHREE-DEV-0714. Check the font name against the table above.
• Unicode text looks broken in Word or PageMaker: the paragraph is still set in the Shree font. Change it to Mangal, Nirmala UI or Kokila. Older PageMaker versions do not lay out Unicode Marathi correctly; for those, use Unicode → Shree Lipi.
• English words turned into Marathi letters: plain text carries no font names, so everything is read as Shree. Copy from Word instead, or convert the .docx: English set in another font is then left alone.
• Numbers came out as ०–९: that is what the Shree font showed. Western digits typed in another font are kept when you paste from Word.
• A word still converts wrongly? Send the Shree text, the font name and the correct Marathi to hello@kruti-dev-to-unicode.com.

Frequently Asked Questions