Mangal is a Unicode font, so converting to Mangal means producing Unicode and applying Mangal to it. Paste below, then set the font. Portals and e-filing systems will accept the result.
Mangal is a font. Unicode is an encoding.
This confuses almost everybody at first, and it explains the single most common complaint about legacy Hindi: “I changed the font to Mangal and it turned into rubbish.”
Here is why. Kruti Dev keeps क as the ASCII byte for d. Mangal keeps it as U+0915. Those are different pieces of data, not different pictures of the same data. Changing the font dropdown does not touch the bytes. It just draws the old bytes with new shapes, and since d in Mangal is the English letter d, you get English letters.
Actual conversion rewrites the characters underneath. Once that is done, Mangal displays it correctly. So will Nirmala UI, Noto Sans Devanagari, Aparajita, Kokila and everything else. That portability is the entire point of the standard.
Four practical reasons departments move
- Portals refuse it. E-filing systems, RTI portals and departmental CMSes expect Unicode. Kruti Dev bytes arrive as mojibake, and the clerk gets blamed.
- Nothing is findable. A notification typed in Kruti Dev cannot be located by searching its own title, not on the department server and not on Google.
- Accessibility is now a requirement. NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack all read Unicode Devanagari. None of them can read Kruti Dev, because there is no Hindi there to read.
- Archives rot. A file that needs a specific 1990s font to be legible is a file with an expiry date attached.
Output here is normalised to NFC, which is the form most databases, portals and search indexes expect.
The two systems compared
| Property | Kruti Dev 010 | Mangal |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Legacy glyph font | Unicode font |
| How क is stored | ASCII d | U+0915 |
| Font needed to read it? | Yes, on every machine | No, any Devanagari font works |
| Google can index it? | No | Yes |
| Screen readers | Nothing | Full support |
| Keyboard | Remington | InScript or phonetic |
| Ships with Windows? | No, install it yourself | Yes, since Windows XP |
Kruti Dev and Mangal
Is Kruti Dev to Mangal the same as Kruti Dev to Unicode?
Yes. Mangal is a Unicode Devanagari font, so producing Mangal text means producing Unicode text and then applying Mangal to display it. The conversion step is identical, which is why this page and the Kruti Dev to Unicode page share one engine.
Do I need to install Mangal?
On Windows it has been included since XP, so it is already there. On Mac, Linux, Android and iOS you do not need it at all. The system will pick its own Devanagari font and show the same Unicode text correctly.
Why did changing the font in Word not convert anything?
Because the underlying bytes stayed the same. Kruti Dev text set to Mangal is still Kruti Dev bytes drawn with Mangal glyphs, which is unreadable. The characters themselves have to be rewritten.
Is the output safe for government portals?
It is standard NFC-normalised Unicode, which is what portals and e-office systems are built to accept. If a specific portal rejects it, the problem is almost always a field length or character restriction rather than the encoding.
What about Nirmala UI?
Same answer as Mangal. Nirmala UI is the default Devanagari font on Windows 10 and 11, and it is a Unicode font, so this output works with it unchanged.