Anmol Lipi ↔ Unicode Converter

This converter works both ways. Paste Anmol Lipi (or GurbaniAkhar, GurbaniLipi, OpenGurbaniAkhar) text and read clean Unicode Gurmukhi out of the right-hand pane. Or paste Unicode Punjabi and take away Anmol Lipi ASCII for the legacy systems that still expect it. The Swap button between the panes moves your output back into the input box, so you can flip direction mid-job (or round-trip a paragraph to confirm nothing got mangled) without re-pasting anything.

We merged the two single-direction pages into this one because that is how the work arrives. A clerk digitising an old gurdwara notice converts Anmol to Unicode in the morning, then converts a Unicode circular back to Anmol the same afternoon for a typist who never left the old font. Keeping both jobs on one page means one bookmark, one tool to learn, and no hunting for "the other converter" halfway through a document.

Everything runs locally in your browser: roughly 80 mapping entries, applied longest-match-first, in well under 100 ms for a typical page of text. Nothing you paste is uploaded to our servers in either direction.

Open the file that holds your Anmol Lipi text (a Word document, a PageMaker export, an old .txt) and copy the passage you need. If the text shows up as gibberish English letters on your machine, that is normal: it means the Anmol Lipi font is not installed, and it is exactly the text you want.

• Step 1. Paste the Anmol Lipi text into the left-hand box. The character counter confirms what landed; up to ~5,000 characters per pass works best.
• Step 2. Press Convert →. The converter first moves every pre-positioned sihari (the i-matra typed before its consonant) to its Unicode position, then applies the ~80-entry mapping table, longest match first.
• Step 3. Read the Unicode Gurmukhi in the right-hand pane and press Copy output. Paste it into Word, Gmail, a government portal, or WhatsApp — it renders everywhere, no font required.

The mapping is ported from the open-source shabados/gurmukhi-utils TypeScript converter, the same table used by Gurbani software projects. It covers all four ASCII Gurmukhi font families — Anmol Lipi, GurbaniAkhar, GurbaniLipi, and OpenGurbaniAkhar — which share roughly 95% of their encoding. A post-mapping sanitisation pass merges combining sequences (ਅ + ਾ becomes ਆ, ਸ + ਼ becomes ਸ਼) so the output uses the precomposed code points Unicode software expects.

The reverse trip starts from normal Unicode Punjabi — text typed on a Raavi keyboard, copied from a website, or received over email — and ends in Anmol Lipi ASCII for software and print workflows that still live in the old font.

• Step 1. Paste your Unicode Gurmukhi into the input box. If you just converted something the other way, press Swap instead of re-pasting.
• Step 2. Press Convert →. The converter inverts the canonical shabados mapping, walking the table longest-match-first so multi-character Anmol sequences such as pair-rara (੍ਰ, typed R) come out as single keystrokes rather than fragments.
• Step 3. Copy the output into your document, select it, and set the font to Anmol Lipi. Only then will it render as Gurmukhi.

That last step trips people up most. Anmol Lipi output is not broken when it looks like English; it is ASCII by design. The glyphs live in the font file, not in the characters. Hand the converted text to a print shop or a typist along with the font name and it will set correctly.

Anmol Lipi → Unicode: rescuing old files for the modern web

Punjab's institutional memory is full of Anmol Lipi. Gurdwara committees produced decades of notices, kirtan schedules, and shabad sheets in it. District offices and tehsil-level departments typed circulars in it well into the 2000s. DTP shops in Ludhiana, Jalandhar, and Amritsar built wedding cards, posters, and book interiors on Anmol-based PageMaker and CorelDraw templates. None of that text can go onto a website, into a WhatsApp group, or into a searchable archive until it becomes Unicode.

Exam aspirants hit the same wall from a different side. PSSSB Clerk and PSPCL Junior Assistant typing tests run on Unicode with Raavi-style layouts — but a lot of the Punjabi practice material in circulation was typed in Anmol Lipi years ago. Convert it here, then drill it on our PSSSB Punjabi typing test on the layout the exam uses.

Unicode → Anmol Lipi: feeding workflows that never migrated

The old font did not disappear; it retreated into specific rooms. Typing institutes across Punjab still teach and test on Anmol Lipi keyboards, and their students need fresh practice passages, which today mostly exist in Unicode. Print shops hold years of proven templates whose text frames are set in Anmol Lipi, and re-flowing a design costs more than converting the text. Office and religious publishing pipelines built around Anmol-era macros and paragraph styles accept ASCII text and nothing else.

In all three cases the job is the same: take modern Unicode text, convert it here, apply the Anmol Lipi font at the destination, and the legacy workflow carries on untouched.

Anmol Lipi, designed by Dr. Kulbir Singh Thind, predates usable Gurmukhi support in mainstream operating systems. The trick it uses is the same one Kruti Dev uses for Hindi: it is an ASCII font. The file stores ordinary Latin characters — k, K, g, G — and the font draws Gurmukhi shapes over those codes. Type "k" and you see ਕ; the document, underneath, still says "k".

The key assignments are broadly phonetic, which is why typists learned the layout fast: k is ਕ, K is ਖ, g is ਗ, G is ਘ, c is ਚ, j is ਜ, t is ਟ, q is ਤ, p is ਪ, b is ਬ, m is ਮ, r is ਰ, s is ਸ. Shift usually gives the aspirated partner. Vowel signs sit on vowel-like keys: w is kanna (ਾ), i is sihari (ਿ), I is bihari (ੀ), u and U are the onkar pair (ੁ ੂ). Rarer signs ride on punctuation and high-ASCII codes: ^ is ਖ਼, & is ਫ਼, Z is ਗ਼, and ੴ (Ik Onkar) hides behind <>.

One quirk matters more than the rest: the sihari. On an Anmol keyboard you strike i before the consonant, mirroring how the matra is written to the left of the letter on paper. Unicode stores it the other way — consonant first, vowel sign after — and lets the rendering engine reorder visually. Every Anmol converter must therefore swap "i + consonant" pairs before mapping, which this tool does with a regex pre-pass.

This design is also why Anmol text breaks the moment it leaves an Anmol font. Strip the font — paste into a web form, an email, a phone — and the system renders the stored ASCII literally: ਸਤਿ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ collapses into "siq sRI Akwl". The characters were never Punjabi; only the font made them look that way. Unicode ends the dependency by giving every Gurmukhi letter its own code point (ਕ is U+0A15), so the text means what it shows on every device.

• Convert in chunks. Up to 5,000 characters per pass works best. Long pastes from PDFs sometimes contain hidden formatting that confuses any converter — break the text into paragraphs.
• Proofread the nukta letters. ਫ਼, ਖ਼, ਗ਼, and ਜ਼ are encoded as specific characters (& ^ Z z) in Anmol Lipi. Skim the output for visibly wrong letters and fix manually.
• Watch the nasal and gemination signs. Tippi (ੰ), bindi (ਂ), and addak (ੱ) convert reliably, but a few GurbaniAkhar and GurbaniLipi builds reassign rare codes, so output from those fonts may need touch-up.
• Check the digits. ASCII digits 0–9 in Anmol text map to Gurmukhi digits (੦ ੧ ੨), and Gurmukhi digits map back to ASCII in the reverse direction. If you want Western digits kept in the Unicode output, restore them by hand after converting.
• For exam answer scripts: never use a converter as a final layer. Practise typing in the format your exam ships — Raavi/Unicode for PSSSB and most Punjab government posts. The TypeForExam practice pages cover the real layouts.

Characters that do not map cleanly

The four ASCII Gurmukhi families agree on about 95% of their codes, and the last 5% is where conversions bleed. Decorative codes (Œ ‰ Ó Ô) were used inconsistently between font versions and have no single right answer, so this tool drops the purely ornamental ones. The yayya variants (Î ï î, half-yayya forms used heavily in Gurbani typesetting) all collapse to plain ਯ in Unicode, which is right for body text but loses a typographic distinction scriptural publishers may care about. The Khanda (☬) and ੴ ride on several different codes (< > Å å ¡) depending on which font cut the document used. If one character comes out blank or wrong, check it against the source font's keymap before assuming the whole conversion failed.

Mixed-font documents

Real files are rarely one font: an office order with an English header and an Anmol Lipi body, or a wedding card with names in English. A converter cannot tell stretches of genuine English from Anmol-encoded Punjabi, because both are stored as ASCII. Run English text through the Anmol → Unicode direction and it will be "converted" into Gurmukhi soup. The fix is procedural — convert the Punjabi passages separately and reassemble, rather than pasting whole documents.

Hidden characters from Word and PDFs

Copying out of Word or a PDF often drags along smart quotes, soft hyphens, and non-breaking spaces. Some of those codes overlap with Anmol's high-ASCII assignments and convert into unexpected Gurmukhi marks. If a passage misbehaves, pass it through a plain-text editor first, or convert paragraph by paragraph to isolate the offending span.

The reverse output is English letters

Not a bug. Anmol Lipi output is ASCII and reads as Latin characters until you apply the Anmol Lipi font in the destination document. If it still looks wrong with the font applied, your machine probably carries a renamed or re-cut copy of the font — confirm the exact family name in the font menu matches what the document expects.