Saral → Unicode Converter

Saral is a legacy ASCII Gujarati font by Kulbir S. Thind. Each Gujarati character is mapped to a Latin keystroke. When you type "k" with Saral applied, the visual glyph is "ਕ"; when you type "kw", the rendered output is "ਕਾ". Without Saral installed, your device shows the underlying Latin characters.

Unicode Gujarati is the modern standard. Each Gujarati character has a dedicated code point (ਕ is U+0A15) and renders identically on every system without needing a special font.

The converter ports the canonical mapping from the open-source SaralSoft TTF cmap. The mapping covers Saral, LMG-Saral, LMG-Saral2, and OpenLMG-Saral — all four ASCII Gujarati font families share ~95% of their encoding.

The conversion algorithm has two steps: (1) move Gujarati i-matra (i-matra) from before the consonant to after via regex pre-processing, then (2) apply longest-match substitution from the 111-entry mapping table. This faithfully matches the canonical algorithm.

• 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 conjuncts. Gujarati conjuncts and special letters like ਫ਼, ਖ਼, ਗ਼, ਜ਼ are encoded as specific characters (& ^ Z z) in Saral. Skim the output for visibly broken stacks and fix manually.
• Watch for diacritics. Anuswar (ं), chandrabindu (ँ), and visarg (ः) are reliably converted, but if your source uses non-standard glyph mappings (LMG-Saral, LMG-Saral2, OpenLMG-Saral (all share most of their mapping with Saral)), output may need touch-up.
• Numerals stay as-is. ASCII digits (0-9) and Devanagari digits (० १ २ ३) pass through unchanged. If you need to convert digit forms, do it manually.
• For exam answer scripts: never use a converter as a final layer. Practise typing in the actual format the exam ships (Kruti Dev for SSC CHSL Hindi, Mangal/InScript for DSSSB and most state govt). The TypeForExam practice pages cover both.