Converting LMG fonts to Unicode
LMG-Arun, LMG-Rupen and the rest are among the most common fonts in Gujarati legal practice. What converts today, what does not, and why.
The LMG family is one of the two font families you will meet most often in Gujarati court work. If your office has documents from a typist rather than from a computer operator, there is a good chance they are LMG.
1Which LMG fonts we convert
LMG-Rupen converts. Its table was derived from real documents and verified character by character against them — including thirteen bytes that had to be worked out by rendering the font and reading what it drew.
Other LMG variants are recognised but not yet converted. We will not guess at an encoding: a wrong entry does not produce an error, it produces fluent, plausible, incorrect Gujarati in a document you are about to file.
2Reading a font is not the same as writing into one
There are two different questions about any legacy font, and most tools do not distinguish them.
Reading needs a table entry for the characters a document happens to contain. Writing needs an entry for every letter someone might type. LMG-Rupen currently clears the first and not the second, so we can convert an LMG document to Unicode but cannot convert a Unicode document back into LMG.
- Converting an old LMG filing to Unicode: supported.
- Filling a template whose original font is LMG: not yet — the document is converted to a Unicode font instead.
3If your LMG variant is not supported yet
Send us the font file. Adding a font is now a short job rather than a research project: we render the font’s own bytes, read what it draws, and build the table from that evidence.
What we will not do is add it by guessing from the name. Two fonts shipped under the same name have been found to use completely different encodings.
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.