DevLys came first and Kruti Dev was built on top of its key layout. Because they put the same character on the same key, one tested mapping serves both families.
DevLys and Kruti Dev share a keyboard
This is not a convenient approximation. It is how the fonts were designed.
DevLys arrived first, in the 1990s, built on the Remington typewriter layout that professional Hindi typists already had in their fingers. Kruti Dev followed as its successor and deliberately kept the same key positions, because asking thousands of trained typists to relearn the keyboard would have killed it.
The result is that DevLys 010 and Kruti Dev 010 put the same Devanagari glyph on the same ASCII code. The letterforms look slightly different on the page. The bytes underneath are the same. This is why government typing tests list “Remington keyboard with Kruti Dev 010 / DevLys 010 font” as a single option, and why a candidate trained on one can sit an exam on the other.
So the table on this page is the Kruti Dev table, checked against the same 58-word test suite. The Alt-code characters line up too — Alt+0131 through Alt+0140 for the Devanagari digits, Alt+0152, Alt+0159, Alt+0193 and the rest sit in identical positions.
Which versions convert cleanly
- DevLys 010, 011, 012, 016 — the common ones, fully covered.
- DevLys 020, 040 and other family members — same layout for standard Hindi, so they convert correctly.
- Marathi and Sanskrit — the Devanagari base is shared. ळ and the eyelash ra र् are both mapped.
Rare conjuncts are always worth a visual check before print. Anything unmapped is listed under the boxes rather than being quietly replaced with something that looks close.
DevLys files in the wild
Most DevLys you will meet comes out of DTP archives. Magazine and book layouts, question papers, and press files from the late nineties and early two-thousands, usually sitting in PageMaker or an old CorelDRAW version. Some state departments standardised on DevLys before Kruti Dev took over, so their older circulars are in it. And a lot of typing-tutor software used by coaching institutes still ships DevLys as the practice font.
DevLys questions
Is DevLys genuinely the same encoding as Kruti Dev?
For the standard Hindi set, yes. DevLys was the original Remington-layout font and Kruti Dev was built as its successor using identical key positions, so the same ASCII code produces the same Devanagari character in both. Government typing exams treat them as interchangeable for exactly this reason.
Which DevLys versions are supported?
010, 011, 012 and 016 are the common ones and are fully covered. The rest of the family shares the same layout for standard Hindi and converts correctly as well.
Can I go the other way, Unicode to DevLys?
Yes, there is a separate page for it, linked above the converter.
Does it handle Marathi typed in DevLys?
The shared Devanagari letters do convert, including ळ and the eyelash ra. Marathi-specific typesetting conventions in older layouts are worth proofing before print.