Anu Modular ↔ Unicode Converter

This is a two-way tool. Paste Anu Modular text to get Unicode Telugu, or press the Swap button and paste Unicode Telugu to get Anu ASCII back. One mapping table of roughly 415 entries drives both passes; it was built from the vignesh-seven/telugu-encoder open-source project and applied longest-match-first so that multi-byte Anu sequences resolve as whole aksharas rather than broken fragments. Everything runs in your browser. No sign-up, and no text reaches TypeForExam servers.

Anu Modular is not an obscure format. The Anu Script Manager package from Hyderabad has been the default typesetting tool at Andhra Pradesh and Telangana print shops, newspapers, and government offices since the 1990s, so decades of Telugu text exist as Anu ASCII rather than Unicode. The two encodings cannot read each other. This page is the bridge, in whichever direction you need to cross it.

• Copy the Anu text from your source. An old PageMaker or InDesign job, a Word file typed with Anu Script Manager, or a plain .txt export all work. On screen the text may look like jumbled Latin characters; that is normal — it is the raw ASCII underneath the font.
• Paste it into the input box above. The tool handles about 5,000 characters per pass; split longer documents into chunks.
• Press Convert →. The converter also runs automatically a moment after you stop typing.
• Proofread and copy. Skim the Unicode Telugu output for broken conjuncts, then press Copy output and paste it wherever you need it.

Under the hood, each Anu ASCII sequence maps back to its Unicode Telugu equivalent through the inverted vignesh-seven/telugu-encoder table, with longest matches resolved first to disambiguate compound sequences. The table covers all 13 Telugu vowels, 31 base consonants, and the 12 vowel-matra forms of each consonant.

The result is plain Unicode Telugu. It needs no special font, survives copy-paste between apps, and is what AP and Telangana government portals, search engines, and mobile keyboards expect.

• Press Swap to reverse the converter's direction.
• Paste Unicode Telugu — from a website, WhatsApp, an e-office document, or any modern app — into the input box.
• Convert, then copy the result into your Anu workflow.

The reverse pass walks each Unicode character, or consonant-plus-matra pair, and emits the corresponding Anu sequence from the same mapping table. The output will look like scrambled Latin symbols in this browser; that is correct. Apply an Anu face in PageMaker, CorelDRAW, or Word on a machine with Anu Script Manager installed and it renders as Telugu.

One caution: keep the original Unicode copy. Anu ASCII is a dead end for anything outside DTP — it cannot be searched, indexed, or read aloud — so treat the Anu version as a print artefact, not the master text.

Anu → Unicode: bringing old text forward

• Old DTP files. PageMaker, CorelDRAW, and InDesign jobs from AP and Telangana press houses store Telugu as Anu ASCII. Convert the text layer to Unicode before reusing that copy on a website, in a WhatsApp broadcast, or in a modern Word file.
• Newspaper and magazine archives. Decades of Telugu journalism were typeset in Anu. Converting digitised archive text makes it searchable and quotable instead of locked inside a font.
• Government office documents. GOs, proceedings, and notices typed on Anu Script Manager machines only render on similarly configured computers. Unicode conversion makes them readable on any device and ready for e-office systems.
• APPSC and TSPSC preparation. Online Telugu typing tests and modern study apps run on Unicode. Converting Anu-era material lets you read, search, and practise it on your phone.

Unicode → Anu: feeding legacy pipelines

• Anu-based typing practice. Some AP and Telangana exam centres and coaching institutes still drill candidates on Anu keyboard layouts. Converting Unicode passages gives you authentic Anu practice material.
• Print shops. Many Telugu press operators still run Anu-era workflows and ask for text "in Anu". Converting your Unicode draft saves them retyping it, and saves you the errors retyping introduces.
• Legacy office templates. Letterheads, certificates, and forms built years ago in Anu fonts expect Anu ASCII in their text boxes. Converted text drops straight in without breaking the layout.

An Anu font is, in effect, a costume worn by Latin bytes. The file itself stores ordinary ASCII and extended-Latin characters; the font then paints Telugu shapes over those character slots. Type the right keystrokes with the font applied and you see Telugu. Open the same file anywhere else and you see the bytes underneath — a string of brackets, accented letters, and punctuation.

The "Modular" in Anu Modular describes how the glyphs are organised. Letters are split into reusable pieces — a base consonant shape here, a matra hook there — that the font assembles visually as you type. That design kept font files small and made complex Telugu conjuncts possible on 1990s hardware, but it also means a single akshara can span three or four bytes. A converter has to recognise the whole sequence, which is why this tool matches longest sequences first.

Anu Script Manager has shipped in several releases; versions 6 and 7 are the ones still common on AP and Telangana office machines. They share the bulk of the encoding, with a handful of glyph slots that moved between releases — the usual cause when a mostly-clean conversion stumbles on one stubborn character.

Why does any of this matter? Send an Anu file to someone without the font and they get gibberish. Search engines cannot index it, screen readers cannot speak it, and phones cannot display it. Unicode solves all of that by giving every Telugu letter a permanent code point — క is U+0C15, and కా is క plus the ా matra — so the text itself is Telugu, not a picture of Telugu drawn by a font.

Version mismatches. If most of the text converts cleanly but a few characters come out as the wrong letter every time, your source was probably typed on a different Anu Script Manager release than the mapping assumes. Fix those characters manually — they tend to repeat, so a find-and-replace handles them fast — or send us the input via the contact page and we will extend the table.

Characters that do not map cleanly. Telugu conjuncts (oththulu) such as క్ష, త్ర, and జ్ఞ are multi-byte sequences in Anu, and rare three-consonant stacks or Sanskrit-heavy vocabulary occasionally fall outside the ~415-entry table. The symptom is a visibly broken stack or a stray Latin character in otherwise clean output. Patch those by typing the akshara directly with a Unicode Telugu keyboard.

Hidden formatting. Text copied out of PDFs carries invisible characters — soft hyphens, zero-width joiners, ligature artifacts — that can derail any converter. If a paragraph refuses to convert, paste it through a plain-text editor first to strip the noise.

• Convert in chunks. Up to 5,000 characters per pass works best; break long documents into paragraphs.
• Proofread conjuncts in both directions. They are the most encoding-sensitive part of Telugu, whichever way you convert.
• Check sunna and visarga. The anusvara (ం) and visarga (ః) convert reliably on standard Anu sources but deserve a skim when the source used non-standard glyph mappings.
• Numerals pass through unchanged. ASCII digits (0-9) and Telugu digits (౦ ౧ ౨ ౩) stay as they are; convert digit styles manually if your target requires it.
• For exam answer scripts: never lean on a converter as a final layer. Practise typing in the format your exam actually ships — our APPSC TSPSC Telugu typing test covers both InScript and Anu Modular layouts.