InPage to Unicode Converter

What InPage to Unicode conversion means

For about twenty years, almost all professional Urdu typesetting in Pakistan and India was done in InPage. Newspapers, publishers, schools and composing shops built huge archives of .inp files. The catch is that InPage 2000 and 2.x save Urdu in their own private encoding, not in Unicode, the international standard that every phone, browser and modern program uses.

Inside InPage everything looks perfect. The moment you copy that text into Word, an email, a CMS or WhatsApp, the other program has no idea what the codes mean and shows them as Western symbols. A headline turns into a row of ¦Ž¢¡ Š¢¦“¤¡, and nobody can read it.

Converting InPage to Unicode means translating each private InPage code into the correct Unicode Urdu letter. Once converted, the text is ordinary Urdu that you can search, edit on any device, publish online and paste into social media.

How the conversion works

InPage stores each Urdu letter as two bytes. The first is always the same marker; the second identifies the letter, so 0x83 is پ, 0x9C is ک and 0xA6 is ہ. Some letters are built from two codes, such as آ (alif plus madd). The converter reads the pasted text code by code, always checking the longer combinations first, and writes out the Unicode letter for each one.

It then tidies up the result. It uses the proper Urdu forms of ی، ک، ہ، ھ and ے rather than look-alike Arabic letters, applies standard Unicode normalisation, removes invisible control characters, and picks ئ or ء depending on whether the hamza sits inside a word or at its end.

The mapping table was compiled from openly licensed research into the InPage format. The sources are credited on our About page.

Worked examples

These are real outputs from the tool. The left side shows what you see when InPage text is pasted into a normal text box.

A line by Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869). Each letter has its own code, so long verses convert exactly like short words.

Urdu digits and punctuation such as the colon are converted too. English words and Western digits in your document pass through unchanged.

Some codes are invisible on screen, which is why the pasted text looks shorter than the Urdu. They are still there, and the converter reads them.

Common problems and how to fix them

“No InPage characters found”

The text you pasted does not contain InPage codes. Usually it was retyped, came from a screenshot or PDF, or went through an app that cleaned it. Copy straight from InPage with Ctrl+C and paste here with Ctrl+V. For Urdu copied from a PDF, use Fix Broken Urdu Text instead.

“This text is already Unicode Urdu”

InPage 3 and newer can copy real Unicode, and so can most modern Urdu software. If your paste already reads correctly, nothing needs converting and you can use it as it is. Going the other way, from Unicode into an older InPage, is what the Unicode to InPage converter is for.

A few characters are highlighted in yellow

These are codes that are not in InPage’s standard Urdu table, often ornaments, special brackets or symbols from a decorative font. We keep them rather than deleting them, so you can see exactly where to look. Replace them by hand and send us a report so the table can grow.

The Urdu shows as boxes or in a plain Arabic font

The conversion worked, but the program you pasted into lacks a good Urdu font. In Word, select the text and choose Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Jameel Noori Nastaleeq or Urdu Typesetting, then set the paragraph direction to right-to-left. Phones and modern browsers display Urdu automatically.

Words run together or spaces look odd

Make sure you copied from InPage itself and not from an exported PDF. If spacing still looks wrong, run the result through Fix Broken Urdu Text to collapse extra spaces and fix spacing around ۔ and ،.

Who uses this converter

• Composers and printing shops moving years of typeset jobs into Word or onto the web.
• Newspaper and web editors who receive reports typed in InPage and need to publish them online the same hour.
• Teachers and students turning old notes, question papers and theses into editable Unicode.
• Writers and poets sharing their InPage work on Facebook, WhatsApp and blogs without retyping.
• Families and archivists rescuing letters, poetry collections and records kept in old .inp files.

After converting, many of them run the text through the Urdu spell checker or the Urdu word counter, or turn it into a printable file with Urdu Text to PDF. For the whole workflow from InPage to Word, WhatsApp and websites, read how to move Urdu text from InPage.

Your text stays private

Everything happens inside your browser tab. When you paste, the conversion runs on your own computer or phone. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, not even in your browser’s storage. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the converter keeps working. That matters for unpublished news, legal documents and anything personal.