Boishakhi to Unicode converter
For the older documents that predate or sit alongside Bijoy.
Try it — sample text
Boishakhi and Bijoy overlap heavily, so pasting Boishakhi into the Bijoy converter often already works. Try this one if characters come out in the wrong order.
Why legacy Bengali text breaks
Bengali has several writing systems in active use at the same time. They are not variants of one another — they are genuinely different character encodings. Text encoded in one is meaningless to software that expects another, and the result is boxes, question marks or a row of Latin gibberish.
- Unicode (U+0980–U+09FF) — what the web, Word, Google Docs, email and every modern database use.
- Avro — a phonetic input method from Orchid ICT, preinstalled on most Bangladeshi Windows machines. You type plain English letters and it produces Bengali. It is not an encoding: Avro's own output is already Unicode.
- Bijoy — a 1988 legacy encoding still baked into government forms, newspaper systems, printing pipelines and decades-old databases.
- Boishakhi — another legacy scheme, still found in older archived documents.
- SomewhereIn — a phonetic scheme used by some publishers and DTP operators.
So the practical failure almost always looks like one of these:
- You paste Bijoy text into Word, Docs, a web form or a database, and it arrives as garbage.
- You received legacy text from an old system and need it as modern Unicode.
- You must submit Unicode text into a legacy form that only accepts Bijoy.
In every one of those cases the fix is a conversion — and that is what this page does, locally in your browser.
How to use
- Paste or type your text into the top box. Copying straight out of the old system is fine, including from a terminal or an old email.
- Press Convert. Or just start typing — output updates as you go.
- Press Copy result and paste it into Word, Docs, your email or the form that rejected it.
Use Swap if you pasted your text into the wrong box.
Your text stays on your machine
The conversion runs as JavaScript inside this page. Nothing is uploaded, logged or sent to a server, so it is safe to paste confidential drafts, unreleased documents or anything under an NDA. It also keeps working if your connection drops mid-task.
If the output still looks wrong
That usually means the source was not in the encoding you assumed. Try the other directions — a Bijoy source sometimes contains Boishakhi segments, and vice versa. Mixed documents from old systems are common, and converting in two passes (Bijoy → Unicode → Bijoy) sometimes cleans up a stubborn file. If your text is genuinely raw Avro keystrokes rather than Bijoy bytes, this is the wrong tool: Avro is an input method whose normal output is already Unicode.
Related conversions
- Avro to Unicode converter
- Bijoy to Unicode converter
- Unicode to Bijoy converter
- Unicode to Bijoy for Avro users
- SomewhereIn to Unicode converter
A note on Avro searches
Many people search for an “Avro to Unicode converter” after their Bengali text looks broken. That is usually a misdiagnosis: Avro is an input method, not an encoding, so text typed with Avro is already Unicode. When Avro users see garbled text, the bytes are almost always Bijoy. Use the Bijoy to Unicode converter — it is the same job with the right name on it.