Bijoy to Unicode & Unicode to Bijoy Converter

This page handles both Bengali font conversions in a single tool. Paste Bijoy (SutonnyMJ) text into the input box and you get clean Unicode Bengali. Paste Unicode Bengali and work the other way: the same mapping table runs in reverse and returns the Bijoy ASCII codes that render as Bengali once the SutonnyMJ font is applied. The Swap button between the two panes moves the output back into the input, so you can flip direction, or round-trip a passage to spot-check it, without re-pasting anything.

We merged our two single-direction converter pages into this one because the job is one job: a single table of ~175 verified glyph pairs, read forwards or backwards. Whichever direction you need, conversion runs entirely in your browser — no sign-up, no upload, and no text sent to our servers. The tool sits at the top of the page; everything below explains the two directions, when each one earns its place, and how to handle the conjuncts and stray glyphs that trip up every Bengali font converter.

This is the direction most people arrive here for: you have a Bengali document typed years ago in Bijoy, and on any machine without the SutonnyMJ font it reads as gibberish like "Avgvi †mvbvi evsjv". The fix takes under a minute:

• Step 1. Open the source document and copy the Bijoy text. If the file is a Word document with SutonnyMJ applied, copy the text as-is — the underlying ASCII codes are what the converter needs, and they survive the clipboard.
• Step 2. Paste into the left-hand box above. The counter under the box tracks length; stay under roughly 5,000 characters per pass.
• Step 3. Press Convert. The tool looks up each glyph and each multi-character ligature in the mapping table and emits the equivalent Unicode sequence.
• Step 4. Click Copy output and paste anywhere: Word, Gmail, a government portal, WhatsApp. No font installation is needed on the receiving end.

Under the hood, the converter works longest-match-first. Bijoy encodes conjuncts like ক্ষ and স্ত্র as single precomposed glyphs, so the table has to consume those multi-character sequences before falling through to single consonants — otherwise a conjunct would shatter into two unrelated letters. The table also reorders the i-kar: Bijoy stores ি before the consonant it attaches to (the way a typist strikes it), while Unicode stores it after.

The reverse direction matters when the destination still runs on Bijoy. Press shops, DTP operators and a fair number of WBPSC and Bangladesh government offices keep SutonnyMJ as the working font, and they need copy delivered as Bijoy ASCII, not Unicode.

• Step 1. Paste your Unicode Bengali text into the input box. Anything typed on a phone, in Google Docs, or with an InScript or Avro keyboard is Unicode.
• Step 2. Use Swap to work in the reverse direction, then press Convert. The same mapping table runs backwards: each Unicode character or conjunct is replaced by its Bijoy ASCII code.
• Step 3. Copy the output. It will look like Latin gibberish in the box — that is correct and expected.
• Step 4. Paste into your document and apply the SutonnyMJ font. The Latin codes now render as Bengali.

The output box stays editable, so you can make spot fixes before copying. One habit worth keeping: convert a paragraph, apply the font, and proofread before committing a whole document. Reverse conversion has more edge cases than forward conversion, because several Unicode sequences can map to the same Bijoy glyph and the table has to pick one.

Bijoy → Unicode: rescuing legacy text

Bijoy was the de-facto standard for Bengali computing from the late 1980s until Unicode tooling matured, so an enormous amount of Bengali text exists only as Bijoy ASCII. Typical jobs for this direction:

• SutonnyMJ-era documents. Old office files, society records, question banks and coaching notes typed in Bijoy open as Latin garbage on any modern machine without the font. Convert once and the text becomes portable for good.
• DTP and press files moving to the web. Newspapers, magazines and book publishers that composed in Bijoy-based PageMaker or InDesign workflows need Unicode to publish the same text on a website, an app, or an e-paper. Search engines cannot read Bijoy ASCII; they index Unicode fine.
• WBPSC Unicode prep. Newer West Bengal exam centres run Unicode keyboards (InScript on Vrinda or Nirmala). If your practice material came from a coaching centre as Bijoy files, convert it to Unicode so you can drill on the layout the exam will use.

Unicode → Bijoy: feeding legacy workflows

• Practice text for Bijoy-based typing. Some West Bengal and Bangladesh centres still test on the Bijoy keyboard. If you draft passages in Unicode or pull them off the web, converting them to Bijoy gives you authentic drill material for that layout — pair it with our WBPSC Bengali typing test.
• Press and DTP templates. Composing rooms with locked SutonnyMJ templates take copy faster as Bijoy ASCII than as Unicode they would have to re-key.
• Colleagues on old setups. Sharing text with an office that never migrated means delivering it in the encoding their machines can render.

Bijoy is a keyboard-plus-font system released by Mostafa Jabbar in 1988 — the "MJ" in SutonnyMJ is his initials. It predates Unicode, so it solves the Bengali rendering problem the only way that era allowed: it borrows the 8-bit ASCII/ANSI code space. Code 75, which the rest of the world reads as the letter K, is painted as ক by the SutonnyMJ font. Code 118 (v) is painted as the া kar. The text file itself contains only Latin codes; the Bengali exists purely in the font's glyph artwork.

Because Bengali has far more than 256 shapes, the Bijoy keyboard works in layers. Plain keystrokes give one set of characters, Shift gives another, and conjuncts (juktakkhor) get dedicated precomposed glyphs parked in the upper-ASCII range — ক্ষ, জ্ঞ, ত্ত, ন্ধ and dozens of others each occupy a single code point of their own. A trained Bijoy typist also strikes some vowel signs before the consonant: the ি kar is typed first, then the consonant, mirroring how the mark prints to the left of the letter.

This is exactly why Bijoy text breaks everywhere outside a Bijoy font. Change the font, mail the file, paste it into a browser — anything that renders the codes with a normal font shows the raw Latin: "Avgvi" instead of আমার. Screen readers speak nonsense, search engines index nonsense, and spellcheckers flag every word. Unicode fixed all of this by giving every Bengali character a permanent address (ক is U+0995; the Bengali block runs U+0980 to U+09FF), which is why conversion, not another font install, is the durable fix.

Broken conjuncts (juktakkhor)

Conjuncts are where every Bijoy converter earns or loses its keep. The mapping table covers the standard set — ক্ষ, জ্ঞ, ত্র, ন্ত, স্ত, ষ্ণ and the rest of the common stacks — but Bijoy files in the wild sometimes build rare conjuncts out of hasanta sequences instead of the precomposed glyph, and a few decorative fonts moved glyphs to non-standard slots. If a stack comes out shattered (two letters where one fused form should be), retype that word in the output box; it stays editable for exactly this reason.

Characters that don't map cleanly

A handful of Bijoy code points are ambiguous. The same upper-ASCII glyph can serve as a kar in one font build and as punctuation in another; curly quotation marks and the dash-like Ð glyph are frequent offenders, so expect to fix the odd quote mark by hand. Numerals are mapped both ways (0–9 ↔ ০–৯), which means digits change script during conversion — if you need them left alone, restore them afterwards.

Vowel signs sitting one position off

Bijoy stores ি and ে to the left of the consonant they belong to. Forward conversion reorders the ি kar automatically, but a paste that scrambled the character order (PDF extraction is the usual culprit) can leave a vowel sign stranded. Fix the pair by hand and re-run the surrounding sentence.

Long pastes from PDFs

PDF text extraction inserts soft hyphens, line-break artifacts and stray spaces that no converter can guess through. Convert in chunks of a few paragraphs (the box comfortably takes about 5,000 characters) and skim each chunk. Clean input converts clean; mangled input converts mangled.

For exam answer scripts

Never lean on a converter as the final step before an exam. Practise on the layout your centre ships — Bijoy at older West Bengal and Bangladesh centres, Vrinda/InScript Unicode at newer ones. Our WBPSC Bengali typing test covers both layouts with live scoring.