How I Built a Nepali Unicode-Preeti Converter

Nepal has a unique font problem.

Modern Nepali text uses Unicode — the international standard, works everywhere, renders natively on all devices. But thousands of government offices, newspapers, and legacy systems still use Preeti font — a 1990s ASCII-based encoding that looks like random English characters unless you have the specific font installed.

Converting between them is a daily task for tens of thousands of Nepali professionals. And the existing tools are... rough. Ad-heavy, outdated UIs, no download option.

So I built Lipi Converter.

What I Built

• Unicode → Preeti and Preeti → Unicode conversion
• Download as PDF or DOCX (most converters don't have this)
• Zero ads

Tech Stack

The conversion logic itself is essentially a character-map lookup — each Unicode Devanagari character maps to a specific character in the Preeti encoding. The complexity is in handling conjuncts (combined characters like क्ष, त्र, ज्ञ) which require multi-character mappings and ordering rules.

What's Next

• Windows app (Rust) — so you can type Nepali directly in any Windows app
• More font support: Kantipur, Himali, AMS, Krutidev, Shreedev

Live: lipiconverter.com

Would love to hear from other devs working with non-Latin script encoding problems — the solutions are surprisingly similar across languages.