Kruti Dev

Kruti Dev (Devanagari: कृतिदेव) is an older version of the Devanagari font. It is a part of the sans-serif group and is not Unicode based. It was created for typing in Hindi. During the 1990s and into the early 2000s, it became the main choice for many offices in India. Kruti Dev works as a glyph font. It makes use of special ASCII-style key mappings to store Devanagari letters. But these mappings do not follow a clean Unicode-compliant encoding method.

Krutidev is quite famous today as one of the most sophisticated systems. It has widespread use in government systems, exams, typography practices, and printing systems across India.

In this article, we explore and learn about the origin of Krutidev, Remington style mechanisms, its technical foundation, usage, and logic necessary to construct Kruti Dev converter to Unicode.

To understand Krutidev, the first step is to understand the shift from manual typewriters to early desktop computers.

Before the advent of the digital world, Hindi was typed with the help of manual typewriters. It was because of companies like Remington Rand, who devised a method for applying Devanagari’s multiple characters and vowel markings onto a keyboard. But this had to be executed in such a manner that the typing arms of manual typewriters did not collide with one another. As a result, typing in this language resulted in Remington's layout, where the characters and markings of Devanagari became part of a system based on keyboard mechanics as opposed to logic.

The technology advanced and made Devanagari typing available, as earlier it was not available due to only English typing and American ASCII coding.

There were multiple entries of coding systems at this time in the market, which marked the download of fonts to type in the documents. At this point of time, Krutidev became a powerful option because of its easy use with the latest version of DTP. Because of the dependency on Remington’s manual typewriter keys, Krutidev enabled the transformation from manual to digital computers.

From a computer science point of view, Kruti Dev can be seen like a visual cipher. It works on regular English text, but it changes how the letters look. It does not follow a standard Unicode pattern. Instead, it swaps Devanagari shapes into fixed ASCII character spots.

In a normal basic keyboard setup, if you press the “d” key, the system will mark the entry as a lowercase English character. When Kruti Dev is used in a document, nothing changes about what the computer stores. It still keeps the letter d in the data. But what appears on the screen is different. The font file changes the look, so the displayed character becomes the Devanagari consonant क, which is labeled Ka. If you press the “k” key instead, the display is not the letter k. It shows the sign ा, called the Aa matra. So, to enter the Hindi word का (Kaa), the typist hits “d” and then “k”. The saved text in the document is still “dk”.

But this technique has its own drawback. It leads to Mojibake, or “gibberish” text. If you write in Kruti Dev, the reader must have the exact font installed. Without that font, the words do not show up correctly. They turn into symbols that cannot be read or understood when you move the text to another device. This is an issue for everyday tasks. It fails when you copy the text, share it, or email it to someone else. The receiver ends up with the distorted output. There is also one more deeper issue. The stored text is not real readable text. It is basically random English letters. So most tools struggle with it. Text processing, search, and indexing do not work well in modern systems. Search engines cannot properly index a page made in Kruti Dev. Web crawlers only detect a string of meaningless Latin characters.

There is one fundamental difference between modern, phonetic typing and Kruti Dev. Kruti Dev typing makes a lot of physical adjustments because of the restriction of the number of keys. This is because KrutiDev’s layout was designed keeping in mind the way the typewriters worked and sounds were used to decide how the letters would be arranged.

Consider for an instance, how the short “i” matra “ि” must be keyed on typewriters because of its position. On a typewriter, most of the matras go to the right of the consonant and thus require being typed after. Kruti Dev’s “i” matra, on the other hand, actually rests on the left of the consonant, necessitating being typed first, although when you speak, the matra follows the consonant.

The Hindi word for "that," "कि," consists of the matra 'ि' and the consonant 'क' (keyed as f and d, respectively, on Krutidev, as typed from left to right). Typing the word “कि” as two separate characters (with the 'ि' keyed first and then 'क') takes time to get used to initially, but because of the absence of lagging software, experienced users can type at a fast pace of about 40 words per minute.

Hindi typing doesn’t just have straight letters. There are words that are combinations of different matras, full letters, half-letters, and some conjunct symbols. There was, therefore, a need to design more symbols for Devanagari using Extended ASCII and have the users enter those characters with combinations of Alt+Four Digit Number sequences.

For professional Kruti Dev users (data entry, design, publishing), learning all the Alt combinations is a prerequisite. This Kruti Dev Alt Code Cheat Sheet can help users quickly memorize these combinations.

Even after the extensive usage of Unicode, Kruti Dev has a strong presence in India.

To keep a uniform language code across the World Wide Web, Unicode was adopted. With the help of this adoption, all computers and devices can represent Devanagari characters accurately, such as assigning “क” as U+0915.

This reduced the dependency on other forms of font. The modern content can now be used as is with a uniformity for all kind of operations like searching, indexing, and transport of content.

But this has a technological divide too. The WWW runs on Unicode, but most of India’s printing and archiving is still dependent on KrutiDev. A large number of court documents, land registration details, police files, and even municipal documents have been digitized from 1995 up until 2015 using this technology.

Kruti Dev uses legacy encoding, which is a huge issue for computer science. Archives of old documents and scripts are in Krutidev and need to be converted to modern scripts like Unicode. Most of the administrative portals are web-based and do not allow full integration of older scripts until they are translated to modern Unicode.

There are few web-based conversion programs that can do the basic work, but these programs cannot easily replace all the letters. Few things need to be understood during conversion. These are as follows:

To do all of this requires a huge knowledge and understanding of the Remington and Unicode as well as the rules governing translation between the two.

KrutiDev is the typeface of Hindi typing and publishing. It symbolizes the pre-Unicode Indian typing system. It has played a major role in early Indian digital printing. Because of these reasons, Krutidev had gained quite a lot of fame and is still relevant and useful today.

• Wikipedia Contributors. "Kruti Dev." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. [Wikipedia Reference ]
• Lehal, Gurpreet Singh; Saini, Tejinder Singh; Buttar, Preetpal Kaur (2014). "Automatic Bilingual Legacy-Fonts Identification and Conversion System". Research in Computing Science, Vol. 86, pp. 9–23. [Direct Research Paper PDF ]
• Keniston, Kenneth (2001). "Language, Power and Software". Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Published in Culture, Technology, Communication: Towards an Intercultural Global Village, SUNY Press. [MIT Archival Copy ]
• Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), GIST Group. "GIST: Indian Script Technology, Standardization and Unicode Compliance Efforts". [Official C-DAC GIST Portal ]
• State & Central Public Service Commissions. Official Hindi typing skill test mandates on legacy Remington typewriter layout (e.g., Staff Selection Commission Junior Stenographers, UPSSSC Junior Assistant examination guidelines). [SSC Official Portal ] • [UPSSSC Portal ]