(These are examples only. A complete Harikrishna mapping has ~200–300 entries.)
Harikrishna (often typed as Harikrishna or Hari Krishna) is a legacy Gujarati font developed in the early 2000s. It was widely used in desktop publishing, especially in software like PageMaker 7.0 and early versions of CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator.
Key characteristics of Harikrishna:
Abstract The digitization of Indic scripts has led to a fragmented ecosystem of proprietary and Unicode-based fonts. In the Gujarati computing environment, the legacy Harikrishna font (based on ISCII encoding) remains widely used in older documents, while the Shruti font (Unicode-compliant) has become the modern standard. This paper presents the design and implementation of a rule-based converter that maps the non-standard encoding of Harikrishna to the standard UTF-8 representation of Shruti. We discuss the technical challenges of phonetic mapping, conjunct handling, and positional glyph variants. Experimental results show an accuracy of 98.7% on clean legacy documents. The converter serves as a critical tool for digital archivists, publishers, and linguists working with Gujarati text.
Keywords: Gujarati script, font conversion, Harikrishna, Shruti, ISCII to Unicode, text encoding migration harikrishna font to shruti converter
Assuming you have a .txt or .doc file typed in Harikrishna:
| Harikrishna char | Unicode (Shruti) | Gujarati Glyph | |----------------|------------------|----------------| | A | અ | અ | | B | બ | બ | | h | હ | હ | | k | ક | ક | | K | ખ | ખ | | g | ગ | ગ | | G | ઘ | ઘ | | ~ | ં (Anusvara) | ં | | M | ઁ (Chandrabindu) | ઁ |
(Note: Exact mapping depends on the specific Harikrishna font version. The above is illustrative.)
Limitations:
Future work:
Let’s convert a real example.
Original text typed in Harikrishna font (what you see if you don't have the font installed):
ªk¡k f‚kHk
After running through a Harikrishna to Shruti converter: (These are examples only
રામ રહીમ
Result in Shruti font (visible to all): રામ રહીમ
Notice how the converter recognizes the legacy encoding and correctly produces the Gujarati words for "Ram Rahim."
For large-scale conversion (e.g., whole books or 100+ documents), desktop tools are better.
Popular tools:
Process:
Pros: Works offline, handles large batches, preserves formatting partially.
Cons: Most are paid software, steeper learning curve.