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FM Abhaya to Sinhala Unicode Converter

FM අභය යුනිකේත වෙත හරවන්න.

Paste any FM Abhaya text and see proper Sinhala Unicode appear in real time. The conversion runs entirely in your browser — your text never leaves your device.

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Why this exists

Tens of thousands of legacy Sri Lankan documents — government circulars, school exam papers, newspaper archives, books from the 90s and 2000s — were typed in FM Abhaya, a pre-Unicode Sinhala font. The text looks like Latin gibberish in any modern viewer (Notion, Word 365, Google Docs, iPhone) because those platforms read the bytes as Latin, not Sinhala.

Until those documents are converted to Unicode, they can't be searched, indexed, screen-read, translated, or sent as plain text. This converter rewrites the byte stream into proper Sinhala Unicode that every modern device understands.

How it works

Conversion is done in your browser using a port of the well-vetted rule table maintained by pitaka.lk, a Sri Lankan Buddhist Tipitaka project. Their rules build on the original Sinhala Unicode mapping research published by the University of Colombo School of Computing. The conversion is deterministic — the same input always produces the same output.

Nothing is uploaded, logged, or stored on a server. The text you paste lives in your tab; close the tab and it's gone.

Frequently asked questions

Is this converter free?
Yes — completely free, no signup, no daily limits. It runs in your browser; we don't even see what you convert.
Can I convert a whole document at once?
Yes. Paste any length of FM Abhaya text — a sentence, a paragraph, an entire book chapter — into the left textarea. The Unicode output appears on the right as you paste. There's no upper limit.
What about DL Manel, Iskoola, or other legacy fonts?
v1 covers FM Abhaya only — the most widely used of the legacy Sinhala fonts. Other encodings (DL Manel, FM Malithi, Iskoola Pota in non-Unicode mode) need their own rule tables; if there's demand we'll add them.
How accurate is the conversion?
Excellent on standard FM Abhaya text — the rule table has been refined over years of public use by pitaka.lk and the wider Sri Lankan converter community. Edge cases (rare conjunct ligatures, typed-by-hand glyph errors in the source) may need a manual touch-up. The Unicode output is always copy-pasteable.
Can I edit and format the converted text before sharing?
Yes. Click Open in editor → after conversion. The Unicode text drops into a fresh AkuruLiyo document where you can add headings, lists, formatting, images, and export to PDF / Word / Markdown.