Preparing a Gujarati filing in Unicode
Courts and government portals increasingly expect Unicode rather than typist fonts. What that means in practice for a document you are about to file.
Filing systems that accept text — e-filing portals, government forms, anything that indexes or searches what you submit — need real Unicode. A document typed in a legacy font contains English letters, so as far as those systems are concerned it contains no Gujarati at all.
1How to tell which you have
Open the document and try to search it for a Gujarati word you can see on screen. If the search finds nothing, the text is not Gujarati — it is a legacy font.
A second check: send the file to someone on a different computer. If it arrives as English letters and punctuation, it is legacy.
2What to check after converting
Conversion is accurate but it is automated, and a filing is not the place to find out about an edge case. Read these before submitting.
- Every proper name — parties, advocates, villages.
- Every number: cheque numbers, survey numbers, amounts, section numbers.
- Every date, including Gujarati numerals.
- Anything the converter flagged as unconverted, which it names rather than hiding.
3Keeping the layout the court expects
A cause title is a table — the parties either side of “વિરુદ્ધ”. Converters that work on pasted text destroy that layout, because pasted text has no layout to keep.
Converting the file itself preserves the table, the headings, the numbering and the page setup, which is the difference between a converted document and a converted paragraph.
4Keep the original
Do not delete the pre-conversion file. It is the only record of what the document said before an automated process touched it, and it costs nothing to keep.
Paste a paragraph into the free converter — it runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded. For a whole file, with its tables and formatting intact, use the full converter.