Sooner or later it happens to almost everyone working with Bangla documents: you open a
file from years ago and it is full of strings like evsjv‡`k. It is not
corrupted and it is not a foreign language — it is Bijoy, and it is still common in
government templates, newspaper archives, print layouts and old office files. This page
turns that text back into Unicode Bangla that anything can read. It is a Bijoy to
Unicode converter first and foremost — paste the legacy text and read the result.
People also reach this page under a second name: a Bijoy to Avro conversion is the same job described from the other end. Avro never had a storage format of its own — it hands your application ordinary Unicode Bangla — so the text that comes out of the box above is exactly what you paste back in and keep typing. For the mirror case — text typed in Avro that has to come out as print codes — see Avro to Bijoy.
How to convert Bijoy to Unicode
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Paste the Bijoy text
This page already defaults to the Bijoy → Unicode direction, so you can paste straight into the box without changing a setting.
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Watch the status line, not just the output
It reports whether the text round-trips exactly, used a valid but non-canonical spelling, or contained glyph codes that could not be decoded at all.
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Copy the Unicode result
It needs no special font. Paste it into a website, an email, Word, Google Docs, Excel, or a database field.
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Fix flagged characters by hand
If the status line is red, a few glyph codes fell outside our table and were passed through unchanged. It names them, so you correct two or three characters instead of re-reading the whole document.
The direction control stays visible on purpose. A Bijoy string and an ordinary English sentence use the same bytes, so no tool can separate them with certainty. If a result looks wrong, switch the direction and compare.
What Bijoy text is, and how to spot it
Nothing in the file itself announces that it holds Bangla. There is no BOM, no encoding declaration and no reserved byte range to look for — the text simply occupies the slots that English letters would otherwise use, and assumes the reader has SutonnyMJ selected. That is why an old file can sit in a folder for fifteen years looking less like Bangla than like corrupted English.
The quickest check is to select a line and change its font. If Avwg becomes
আমি under SutonnyMJ, the file is Bijoy. No character in
the document changed — only which glyphs the font chooses to draw for them.
That is also the first thing to grasp before reading any of it back: the text gives a converter nothing to go on. Bijoy letters and ordinary English words hold the same positions, so nothing in the document itself marks which is which. A paragraph that mixes the two is decoded letter by letter, English included. Feed the Bangla stretches in on their own, one run at a time, and watch the line the tool prints beneath the output.
Why convert Bijoy to Unicode at all?
Because Bijoy text is unreadable and unsearchable almost everywhere else. In practice there are five jobs a Bijoy to Unicode conversion gets used for.
- Making a legacy document findable. A Bijoy file cannot be indexed by a search engine, and a Bangla search will never match it. Converting to Unicode is what makes an archive searchable rather than merely stored.
- Republishing online. Websites, blogs, Facebook and news platforms all expect Unicode. Pasting Bijoy there produces gibberish for every reader, because almost nobody has SutonnyMJ installed.
- Getting data into a database or spreadsheet. A field full of
evsjv‡`kcannot be sorted, matched, filtered or exported. Unicode text can. - Editing and spell-checking. Bangla spell checkers, translation tools and modern word processors work on Unicode. They cannot see inside a Bijoy string.
- Accessibility. Screen readers and text-to-speech expect Unicode. A Bijoy document is silent to them — literally unreadable for anyone relying on assistive technology.
The reverse direction matters too, of course. If you need to prepare Unicode text for a print layout or a legacy form template, use the Unicode to Bijoy converter instead — it is the same engine running the other way.
Why reading Bijoy is the harder direction
Converting Unicode to Bijoy and Bijoy to Unicode look like mirror images, but they are not equally difficult. A Bijoy to Unicode conversion is where most converters quietly fail, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of adding more rules.
A Bijoy mapping table lists many conjuncts as single glyphs:
¯‹ is স্ক, ¶ is
ক্ষ. But the table that reads Bijoy back does not
contain those multi-character entries at all — only the pieces, each of which already
carries its own hasanta. So ¯‹ decodes to
স followed by two hasanta marks instead of a clean
conjunct, and the word arrives shredded.
The glyph codes quoted above come from an independent source rather than our own table: the X11 Compose map in the Bangla PDF HOWTO, which is also the table this converter's coverage is measured against.
This converter fixes the cause rather than the symptom. It derives the reverse table from the forward one, which lifted multi-character entries from 5 to 83 and is why conjunct-heavy words — the ones in personal names, place names and technical terms — survive the trip back. If you have ever seen a converter turn সংস্কৃত into সংস্কৃত, that is this bug.
What the status line is telling you
Most converters show you output and nothing else. That is a problem, because reading Bijoy has three genuinely different outcomes and they need different responses.
| Status | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Verified | The text decoded cleanly and re-encodes to exactly what you pasted. | Nothing. Copy the result. |
| Non-canonical | Decoded correctly, but your input used a different but equally valid Bijoy spelling. The same word can be written more than one way. | Nothing. The output is correct. |
| Could not decode | Some glyph codes are outside our mapping table and were passed through unchanged. They are named explicitly. | Fix those few characters by hand. |
The third case is the one worth dwelling on, because it exposes a trap in how converters are usually tested. An undecoded character passes through both directions untouched — so a round-trip check reports success while a character sits there, wrong. This tool checks for unrecognised codes separately for exactly that reason, and turns the line red rather than showing a misleading green tick.
Three things that break a Bijoy to Unicode conversion
- Assuming every Bijoy to Unicode converter handles conjuncts. Many reproduce the সংস্কৃত failure above. If your output has stray hasanta marks or letters sitting apart that should be joined, the tool is shredding conjuncts — it is not a problem with your original file.
- Converting mixed Bangla and English in one pass. Because the two share codepoints, real English inside Bangla text gets decoded as Bangla letters. Convert the Bangla runs on their own.
- Expecting punctuation to survive untouched. Bijoy reuses symbols as glyphs, so a genuine em dash can come back as ্ত. Keep punctuation out of the converted run, or fix the few characters the check line flags.
Unicode or Bijoy — which should the result be?
For anything digital, Unicode. That includes websites, email, messaging, Word, Google Docs, spreadsheets, databases and anything you intend to archive. Unicode is searchable, portable, needs no special font, and is what every modern system expects.
The only reason to keep Bijoy is a destination that specifically demands it — a legacy print layout, an InDesign template, or an official form that still specifies an ANSI Bangla font. In that case, convert to Unicode first to clean the text up, then use the Unicode to Bijoy converter on the result. For a document like that, a round trip through a Bijoy to Unicode converter and back is usually the fastest way to repair it.
Bijoy to Unicode: frequently asked questions
What is Bijoy text, and why does it look like English letters?
Bijoy is a legacy Bangla encoding that predates widespread Unicode support. Rather than giving Bangla characters their own codepoints, it reuses the ordinary Latin range — the code that normally draws an `A` draws `অ` when SutonnyMJ is active.
That is why Bijoy text looks like nonsense English such as `Avwg`, which is really `আমি`. The consequence that matters most here: a Bijoy string and a real English string use exactly the same bytes, so no tool can separate them with certainty.
How do I convert Bijoy to Unicode?
Paste the Bijoy text into the box above. This page already defaults to the Bijoy to Unicode direction, so you can paste straight in.
If you need it the other way, the direction control switches in one click. Bijoy shares its bytes with ordinary Latin text, which is why the direction is never chosen for you here — it stays exactly where you put it.
Why should I convert Bijoy to Unicode at all?
Because Bijoy text is unreadable and unsearchable almost everywhere else: no search engine can index it, no database can sort or match it, and no screen reader can see inside it.
Converting a legacy document to Unicode is what makes it searchable, editable, shareable and future-proof.
When reading Bijoy back, do conjuncts stay intact?
Reading Bijoy back is where most converters quietly fail, and the cause is structural. Many conjuncts exist forward only as single glyphs — `¯‹` is `স্ক`, `¶` is `ক্ষ` — so a reverse table built from single characters cannot match them.
The result in other tools is a shredded word. This converter derives the reverse table from the forward one, which raised its multi-character entries from 5 to 83 and lets conjunct-heavy names and terms survive.
The result contains a few odd characters, or the check line turns red. What happened?
Two things trigger it, and the tool says which. A red message means some characters could not be decoded: the text uses glyph codes outside our table, so they were passed through unchanged and named for you.
A neutral message means it decoded correctly but used a valid, non-canonical spelling — Bijoy is not formally specified, so `wb¤œ` and `wbgœ` are both `নিম্ন`. Nothing is wrong; re-encoding gives the other equivalent form.
Are there Bijoy characters this converter cannot decode yet?
Yes — better to list them than pretend otherwise. Bijoy is not formally specified: different fonts, keyboards and eras use slightly different glyph codes, so no available table is complete.
One code is known to be missing: the byte 0xFF. It appears in real documents — we found it inside `স্বাক্ষরকারী` in a government circular — but we could not confirm its exact conjunct from authoritative sources, so we do not guess. Text containing it shows the character unchanged and raises the red warning.
Coverage is measured against an independent source rather than asserted: the X11 Compose ligature map in the Bangla PDF HOWTO lists 134 real glyph codes. This engine decodes 99.3% of them to clean Bangla and 99.2% to the correct conjunct; the gap is documented, not hidden.
Why did some punctuation come back as Bangla letters?
Because Bijoy uses ordinary punctuation and symbol codepoints to carry Bangla glyphs. A genuine em dash inside Bijoy text will come back as `্ত`, for example.
This overlap is inherent to the encoding and no converter can resolve it automatically. If your document mixes real punctuation with Bangla, convert the runs separately — the check line flags exactly which characters moved.
Can I convert a whole document instead of pasting text?
Not yet — this page converts pasted text. Document upload is next, and it is harder than it looks: in a Word file a single Bangla syllable is often split across several internal text runs, so a naive find-and-replace shreds the conjuncts it should preserve.
We would rather ship it correctly than early. Meanwhile, copying from a document and pasting here works for anything you can select.
Will the Unicode text work everywhere afterwards?
Yes — that is the whole point. Once converted, the text is ordinary Unicode Bangla, which is what websites, email, messaging apps, Word, spreadsheets and phone keyboards all expect.
You no longer need a special font, and unlike the Bijoy original the text can be searched, copied between applications, and read aloud by accessibility tools.
Does converting an old document upload it anywhere?
No. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere — the engine runs as JavaScript inside your browser, which matters more here, since legacy documents are often internal or confidential.
You can check this yourself rather than trusting it: convert a line with the network inspector open and read the requests it makes; none carries the text you pasted.