The first ever proposal to include Ol chiki, the writing system used for the Santali language, in the Unicode block was proposed by Michael Everson on January 29, 1999. However, there exist a handful of other legacy character encoding systems which are mostly modified from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII (ASCII). Such encoding systems not only display gibberish on smartphones but also on computers where the font used for typing any document is not used.

Read (ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ) our blog on this issue for more information.

Most print publications still use these legacy encoding systems instead of using Unicode where the latter continues to be a universal standard. Until all Santali users move to Unicode, this converter is a temporary fix for making the Santali content accessible to all in a universal standard like Unicode.

You can copy any Santali text typed in Ol chiki using one of the most used legacy encoding (see example) on the left field of the converter and it converts the text instantly into Unicode. Once converted, there might be a need for some minor proofreading but the Unicode text could be used and anyone using a modern computer or smartphone that has the right fonts built-in can read it without the need for any font installation.

Try the converter below: