Bijoy to Unicode Converter

Why Bijoy text turns into English letters

Bijoy Bayanno has been the most widely used Bangla typing system in Bangladesh for decades, especially in offices, newspapers, composing shops and schools, usually with fonts such as SutonnyMJ. Classic Bijoy is an ANSI system: it stores ordinary English keyboard characters and draws them as Bangla shapes only when a Bijoy font is applied. The letters Avwg look like আমি in SutonnyMJ, but anywhere else they stay as Latin characters.

Unicode stores the real Bangla letters. Text in Unicode displays correctly on Facebook, WhatsApp, Gmail and every website, can be found by Google search, and works on any phone without a special font. That is why government websites, news portals and social media all use Unicode Bangla.

How to convert Bijoy to Unicode

1. Copy your Bijoy text from MS Word, Excel or a composing file with Ctrl + A and Ctrl + C.
2. Paste it in the left box. It looks like English letters and symbols; that is expected.
3. Copy the Unicode Bangla from the right box and paste it into Facebook, a website, Google Docs or an email.
4. In Word, select the pasted text and choose a Unicode font such as Nirmala UI or SolaimanLipi.

Examples

The hard parts of Bijoy conversion are the pre-base vowel signs (ি ে ৈ), which Bijoy types before the consonant, the reph (র্), which Bijoy types after it, and hundreds of conjuncts (যুক্তবর্ণ). This converter reorders all three automatically, and joins ে + া into ো as Unicode requires.

How accurate is it?

We tested this converter on multi-paragraph news and parliamentary texts from an open-source Bijoy test set, and the Unicode output matched the expected text character for character. Very rare conjuncts, decorative symbols and text from non-standard Bijoy fonts can still differ, so proofread names and numbers once before publishing. The character table is adapted from the MIT-licensed laravel-bangla-text-converter project, with additional handling for reph, phala and vowel order.

Bijoy, Avro and Unicode

Avro Keyboard types directly in Unicode, so anything typed with Avro needs no conversion. Newer versions of Bijoy can also type Unicode; the problem is only with text typed in the older ANSI mode or with SutonnyMJ-type fonts. If your text already shows correctly on Facebook, it is already Unicode.

Character codes for every Bangla letter are listed in the official Unicode Bengali chart.

How to type Bangla in Unicode from now on

Converting old text fixes the past; typing in Unicode avoids the problem in future. You can:

• Use Avro Keyboard on Windows, which types Unicode directly and supports both phonetic and fixed layouts.
• Switch Bijoy to Unicode mode if your version supports it, and use a Unicode font such as SolaimanLipi or Nirmala UI.
• Add the Bangla keyboard on your phone (Gboard or the iPhone Bangla keyboard). Phone keyboards type Unicode by default.
• Add Bangla in Windows language settings for typing in Word and browsers without extra software.

Converting long Word files

For a long document, convert it a few pages at a time: select a section in Word, copy, convert here, and paste back as plain text (Ctrl + Shift + V in many apps). Then set the Unicode font for the whole document. Tables and text boxes are best converted one cell or box at a time so that the layout stays intact.

Frequently asked questions

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