Comparison Guide
Krutidev vs DevLys Font
Two nearly identical legacy Hindi fonts with a handful of encoding differences. This guide covers the specific characters that differ and which government departments prefer which.
Quick Verdict
Use whichever font your office or exam requires. The typing experience is virtually identical. If you know one, you can use the other with 10 minutes of adjustment for the handful of characters that differ. The real question is not Krutidev vs DevLys - it is whether your organization has migrated to Unicode yet.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Criteria | Krutidev 010 | DevLys 010 |
|---|---|---|
| Encoding Type | Non-Unicode, ASCII-mapped | Non-Unicode, ASCII-mapped |
| Character Map Overlap | ~95% identical. 194 base entries in Krutidev, DevLys adds ~15 extra entries for matra combinations and alternate encodings. | |
| Key Difference: ख (Kha) | Encoded as "[k" (two characters) | Encoded as "£" (single char) AND "[k" |
| Key Difference: ो Matra | Always "ks" (two chars: k + s) | "ks" or "¨" (single char alternate) |
| Key Difference: ौ Matra | Always "kS" (two chars: k + S) | "kS" or "©" (single char alternate) |
| Font Variants | 5-6 variants (010, 011, 016, 040, Display 490) | 30+ variants (010 through 330+) |
| Primary Users | MP, UP, Rajasthan state govts, CPCT exam | Central govt, some state govts, publishing houses |
| CPCT Exam | Officially supported | Not an official option (use Krutidev instead) |
| Unicode Conversion | Well-supported. 194 mapping pairs. | Uses same mapping + extra entries. Same converter works for both. |
| File Size (TTF) | ~150 KB | ~120-180 KB (varies by variant) |
Why They Are Almost Identical
Both Krutidev and DevLys were created in the 1990s as digital implementations of the Remington Hindi typewriter layout. They solved the same problem at the same time using the same approach - mapping Devanagari glyphs to ASCII positions. The developers independently chose nearly identical mapping tables because the Remington typewriter layout dictated which physical key should produce which character.
The handful of differences exist because the font designers made slightly different choices for characters that the original Remington typewriter did not have. Matras like ो and ौ are visual combinations of two strokes (ा + े and ा + ै), and Krutidev chose to represent them as two-character sequences while DevLys added single-character alternatives for convenience.
In practice, if you hand a Krutidev-typed document to someone with only DevLys installed, about 95% of the text will render correctly. The remaining 5% - mostly words containing ख, ो, or ौ - will show as different characters. This is enough to make documents unreadable in those specific words, which is why proper conversion is still necessary.
Converting Between Krutidev and DevLys
The fastest way to convert is through Unicode as an intermediate step. Convert your Krutidev text to Unicode using our Krutidev to Unicode converter, then convert the Unicode output to DevLys using the Unicode to DevLys converter. This two-step process handles all edge cases because both converters independently normalize the text.
For bulk conversion of office documents, copy the entire document text, run it through both converters, and paste the result into a new document with DevLys (or Krutidev) font selected. Formatting (bold, italics, headings) will need to be reapplied since the conversion is text-only.