DevLys to Mangal Converter

The Government of India has been encouraging all departments to adopt Unicode for Hindi computing since 2010. The recommended Unicode font is Mangal, which comes pre-installed with every copy of Windows since XP. This migration from DevLys to Mangal is one of the most common document conversion tasks in Indian government offices.

DevLys and Mangal represent two different approaches to Hindi on computers. DevLys is a font-level encoding hack from the pre-Unicode era - it maps Devanagari glyphs onto ASCII character slots. Mangal is a proper Unicode font that uses the internationally standardized Devanagari code block (U+0900 to U+097F). The underlying text data is completely different even though both display the same Hindi characters visually.

The practical impact for government employees: a DevLys document saved as a Word file contains ASCII text that only looks like Hindi when the DevLys font is active. Remove the font, and the document becomes unreadable. A Mangal document contains real Unicode text that remains readable in any font, on any device, in any application. This is why the migration matters - it future-proofs decades of government documentation.

This converter performs the DevLys-to-Mangal conversion by decoding DevLys's proprietary ASCII mapping into standard Unicode Devanagari. The output text uses the same Unicode code points that Mangal, Noto Sans Devanagari, Kokila, and every other modern Hindi font renders correctly.