Sinhala Unicode Converter & Singlish Typing (FM Abhaya)

About the Sinhala Unicode Converter & Singlish Typing (FM Abhaya)

Two jobs for Sinhala in one place. Singlish typing: spell Sinhala words in English letters and they turn into Sinhala as you type — mama becomes මම, shrii la\nkaa becomes ශ්‍රී ලංකා — with other spellings of the word you are typing offered one tap away (න or ණ, ල or ළ, a long vowel …). FM font conversion: text typed in FM Abhaya or another FM font looks like › ,xldj as soon as it leaves a computer that has the font; this converter turns it into standard Unicode Sinhala (ශ්‍රී ලංකා) that every phone, app and website shows, and turns Unicode back into FM codes for documents that still use the old fonts.

FM text is typed in the order the signs are drawn: the kombuva (ෙ) comes before its letter, and ේ, ො, ෝ and ෞ are the kombuva plus a sign after the letter; the repaya is typed after the letter it sits on. The converter puts every sign in Unicode order and writes the rakaransaya, yansaya, repaya and joined letters with the zero-width joiner Unicode asks for. Open a Word file and the text set in FM fonts is converted in place. Without a pass, the free preview shows the first words of the result; a Pro pass unlocks all of it.

Common uses

• Typing Sinhala on a computer or phone without a Sinhala keyboard, for Facebook, WhatsApp, e-mail and documents.
• Moving old Sinhala documents and notices typed in FM Abhaya into websites, Google Docs and e-mail.
• Converting a whole Word file of FM text to Unicode while its English parts stay as they are.
• Preparing text for offices and presses that still use FM fonts.

How Singlish typing works

The letters follow the SinGlish scheme of the University of Colombo School of Computing’s Language Technology Research Laboratory, so each Sinhala letter has one spelling and nothing is guessed:

• A consonant takes the vowel after it (ka ක, kaa කා, ki කි, ke කෙ, koe කෝ); a consonant with no vowel takes the al-lakuna (k ක්), so amma is අම්ම.
• Long vowels are doubled (aa, ii or ee, uu or oo); ea is ඒ, oe ඕ, au ඖ, A ඇ and Aa ඈ.
• Capitals and h make the other letters: N ණ, L ළ, T ඨ, D ඪ, th ත, dh ද, sh ශ, Sh ෂ, kh ඛ, bh භ; nnd ඬ, nndh ඳ, nng ඟ.
• r after a consonant makes the rakaransaya (kra ක්‍ර), Y the yansaya (vidhYaava විද්‍යාව), R before a consonant the repaya (aRtha අර්‍ත); kru is කෘ, \n ං and \h ඃ.

Because one spelling gives one result, the page offers the other spellings of the word you are typing as buttons — the quickest way to pick ණ, ළ, ශ or a long vowel without remembering the capitals.

Why FM text turns into Latin letters

FM Abhaya, FM Malithi, FM Bindumathi and the other FM fonts are 8-bit fonts for the Wijesekara typewriter layout: the file holds ordinary keyboard characters (l ක, . ග, f ෙ …) and the font draws a Sinhala shape for each. Without the font, or in an app that picks its own, the keyboard characters show. Unicode stores the Sinhala letters themselves, the way Sri Lanka’s national encoding standard SLS 1134 does, so the text stays Sinhala everywhere.

What the converter fixes

• The kombuva (ෙ, and ෛ typed as ff) goes after its letter or cluster, and with d, a and ! after the letter it becomes ො, ේ, ෝ or ෞ.
• Rakaransaya (%), yansaya (H) and joined letters (Ë ක්‍ෂ, ‡ න්‍ද, ø ද්‍ර) are written with al-lakuna and zero-width joiner, as the Unicode Standard sets out for Sinhala; an al-lakuna or vowel sign typed before % is moved after it.
• The repaya (_), typed after its letter, goes in front of it.
• Letters whose signs have glyphs of their own are read whole: re රු, / රැ, ¨ ලු, ÿ දු, ì බි and the rest.
• Punctuation on other keys is restored: ' full stop, " comma, @ question mark, ( colon, ^ and & brackets.

Word documents

When you open a .docx file, the runs of text set in a font whose name starts with FM are converted in place and set in Iskoola Pota, the Sinhala font of Windows; text in other fonts, tables, pictures, headers and footers keep their look. In Unicode → FM, runs with Sinhala letters are converted and set in FM Abhaya. Old .doc files need saving as .docx in Word or LibreOffice first.

Typing on the Wijesekara layout instead

If you type Sinhala on the standard Wijesekara keyboard, the Virtual Keyboard has that layout on screen; this page adds what it does not have: phonetic Singlish typing and the FM fonts.

Limitations

• The FM table is the one FM Abhaya and its family share; DL-Manel, Kaputa and other legacy fonts have tables of their own and are not supported.
• Singlish follows one fixed scheme; it has no dictionary, so it never guesses which word you meant (use the other spellings it offers).
• Joined letters FM fonts have no glyph for are typed with a visible al-lakuna in Unicode → FM, and named under the result.
• Letters show in your device’s fonts; a very old device may lack a Sinhala font.

Privacy

On this device: nothing is sent

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.