Unicode to InPage Converter

Why Unicode Urdu needs converting for InPage

Most Urdu you meet today is Unicode: text typed on a phone, in Microsoft Word, on Facebook, or published on news websites. Unicode gives every Urdu letter a worldwide standard number, so the same text works on every device.

InPage 2000 and 2.x are older than Unicode Urdu’s widespread use, and they keep their own numbering. To InPage, the letter پ is not the Unicode letter U+067E. It is a private code that InPage invented. When you paste Unicode Urdu into an older InPage, it simply does not recognise the letters. You get boxes, question marks, or a blank line.

That is a real problem in composing shops and newsrooms. A reporter emails a story typed on a phone, the page still has to be made up in InPage, and nobody wants to retype 800 words. The Unicode to InPage converter solves that: it translates each Unicode letter into the code InPage expects, so the text pastes in and flows into your InPage page like anything typed there.

What the converter does to your text

1. Normalises the Urdu. Letters typed on Arabic keyboards (ي، ك، ه، ة) are replaced with their Urdu forms (ی، ک، ہ، ۃ), Arabic-Indic digits become Urdu digits, and invisible direction marks are removed.
2. Encodes each character. Every letter, diacritic and Urdu punctuation mark is written as InPage’s two-byte code. Letters such as آ, ؤ and ۂ are built from two codes, exactly as InPage stores them.
3. Leaves English alone. English words and Western digits remain ordinary text, so mixed lines such as product names or dates survive the trip.
4. Flags what cannot be stored. Emoji and symbols with no InPage code are highlighted instead of silently disappearing.

The conversion uses the same character table as our InPage to Unicode converter, run in reverse. Text converted one way and back again comes out identical, and our automated tests check that on every release.

Worked examples

Each example shows the Unicode input and the InPage text the tool produces. The output looks like nonsense in a browser, but InPage reads it as Urdu.

The visible symbols are only half the story: invisible marker codes sit between them. Always use the Copy button so nothing is left behind.

A line typed on an Arabic keyboard, such as يه كتاب, is first corrected to یہ کتاب and then encoded, so InPage shows the proper Urdu letter shapes.

How to paste the result into InPage

1. Press Copy under the right-hand box.
2. Open your document in InPage and click inside the text box where the Urdu should go.
3. Make sure the text box is in Urdu mode (not English) and uses an Urdu font.
4. Press Ctrl+V (or Edit → Paste).
5. Adjust size, alignment and spacing as usual. The text now behaves like anything typed in InPage.

If your copy of InPage offers several paste options, use the plain paste. Steps can vary slightly between InPage builds. If something looks different on your system, tell us and we will update this guide.

Common problems and fixes

Question marks or boxes appear in InPage

You probably pasted the original Unicode text rather than the converted output, or copied the symbols by selecting them with the mouse. Use the Copy button so the invisible codes are included.

Some characters are highlighted in yellow

InPage has no code for them. Emoji are the usual culprit, followed by rare Arabic letters, curly double quotes and special dashes. Replace them in InPage with a close equivalent, or remove them before converting.

Gol hay and do-chashmi hay look mixed up

If the source text came from an Arabic keyboard, the same letter ه may have been used for both ہ and ھ. The converter turns it into ہ by default. For a smarter repair that recognises common words such as بھی and تھا, run the text through Fix Broken Urdu Text first, then convert.

Line breaks look different

InPage treats each line break as a new paragraph. If your source text had hard line breaks inside paragraphs (common when copying from PDFs or emails), join those lines before converting.

Who uses Unicode to InPage

• Composers and printing presses receiving material by email, WhatsApp or USB in Unicode while still laying out pages in InPage.
• Newspaper desks pulling agency copy and reporters’ mobile stories into InPage page layouts on deadline.
• Book publishers importing manuscripts written in Word into InPage for typesetting.
• Teachers and exam boards that prepare papers in InPage but collect questions from colleagues in Word.

Composers who get text from PDFs often combine it with PDF to InPage, and text that arrives garbled is first repaired with Fix Broken Urdu Text. When a page has to go back out to the web, the InPage to Unicode converter reverses the trip; the guide InPage vs Unicode explains why the two formats differ.

Private by design

Your text never leaves your device. The conversion runs inside this browser tab, nothing is uploaded, and we do not store your input, not even in browser storage. That makes it safe for unpublished stories, exam papers and manuscripts.