Kruti Dev, Preeti or Chanakya? How to Tell Which Font a Document Uses

Start with the font box

Click inside the Hindi text in Word and read the font name on the Home tab. In LibreOffice Writer it is the box at the left of the formatting toolbar. Check three or four places, such as a heading, a table and a paragraph from the middle, because a document passed between offices often carries more than one font.

If the name is greyed out, names a font you do not have, or the file is a PDF, the name cannot be trusted. Then look at the letters.

What the same words look like in each font

Here is भारत सरकार as the keys of each font store it. Your text will say other words, but the look of the letters is a strong clue.

• Kruti Dev and DevLys: Hkkjr ljdkj. Plain English letters, plenty of k for the long aa sign, and short words such as dk, gS, vkSj and esa. Use Kruti Dev to Unicode.
• Abbasi Chanakya: Òkjr ljdkj. Close to Kruti Dev, with an accented letter here and there. Use Abbasi Chanakya to Unicode.
• Preeti and the Nepali fonts: ef/t ;/sf/. Slashes and semicolons inside words. Use Preeti to Unicode.
• Shusha and Shivaji: Baart sarkar. The letters nearly spell the Hindi in English, because the keyboard is phonetic. Use Shusha to Unicode.
• Chanakya, the newspaper font: ÖæÚÌ âÚ·¤æÚ. Accented capitals and signs such as æ and ¤ in almost every word. Use Chanakya to Unicode.
• DV-TT Surekh and Yogesh, for Marathi: ¦ÉÉ®iÉ ºÉ®CÉ®. The letter É again and again, since most letters are a half form plus that bar. Use the Marathi font converter.

Other scripts work the same way. বাংলাদেশ সরকার in SutonnyMJ is evsjv†`k miKvi, தமிழ்நாடு அரசு in Bamini is jkpo;ehL muR, and ગુજરાત સરકાર in Terafont or LMG Arun is U]HZFT ;ZSFZ.

Same keyboard, different name

Many fonts were made by copying a well-known keyboard and changing a few keys. A file in one of them converts almost right with the parent font and wrong in exactly those keys. The figures below are read from the converters' own key maps.

• DevLys 010 types every key the same as Kruti Dev 010, so the Kruti Dev converter is right for it.
• Ajay, Arjun, Kundli, Krishna, Aman, Agra, New Delhi, Ruchi and DevLys 020 share between 144 and 151 of the 152 Kruti Dev keys and add 21 to 44 keys of their own. In Ajay, Arjun, New Delhi and Agra the = key types a half त्र् where Kruti Dev types a full त्र.
• Narad, Aakriti, Devanagari Bold, Anjali and Dina follow Preeti closely. Himalaya and Akshar swap its number row: in Preeti the number keys type letters, so 1 is ज्ञ and 0 is ण्, while in Himalaya and Akshar they type digits.
• Shivaji, Shusha02 and Shivaji02 follow Shusha, with at most five keys different.

Each of these fonts has its own converter page, and each page lists the keys where the font parts ways with its parent.

A quick test when you are unsure

Paste one line into the converter you think is right and read the result slowly. If almost everything is correct and the same one or two letters come out wrong every time, the font is probably a cousin of the one you picked. Open the cousin's page and compare its list of different keys with the letters that went wrong.

If nothing reads as Hindi at all, the text may be in a font this site does not convert yet. The list of all converters shows every font it handles, including those still marked as coming soon.

What this cannot identify

A scanned page or a photo is a picture, so there are no keys to read, and it needs Hindi OCR first. Unicode Hindi, the kind typed on a phone or with the Hindi keyboard built into Windows, needs no detective work at all: it already shows as Hindi in any font with Devanagari and does not need converting.