Preeti and Unicode explained
What Preeti is
Preeti is a Nepali font from the early 1990s. It does not store real Devanagari letters. It stores ordinary keyboard characters and relies on the Preeti font to draw them as Devanagari. For example, the text g]kfnL efiff looks like नेपाली भाषा only while the Preeti font is applied.
That is why Preeti text still turns up in old government forms, news archives and forum posts. It is readable only on a device that has the font, and looks like random letters everywhere else.
What Unicode is
Unicode stores the real Devanagari letters, so the text looks the same on every phone, browser and app, with no special font. It can also be searched, spell-checked, translated and read by screen readers.
When to convert
Convert whenever you want to reuse Preeti text outside the place it was written: in a website, a social post, a modern document, a database or a search. The converter does this in one direction only, from Preeti to Unicode.
Convert from the original Preeti text when you can. Once text has been turned into an image or a PDF without its text layer, there is nothing left to convert.
Ready to try it? See Convert Preeti text to Unicode.