Akuru Tools Sinhala

About Akuru Tools

Bridging the gap between legacy Sri Lankan print media and modern digital typography standards.

Our Mission

Sri Lanka has a rich publishing history spanning decades of newspapers, magazines, books, and legal documents. During the 1990s and early 2000s, desktop publishing systems widely adopted custom ASCII-based fonts such as FM Abhaya, FM Malithi, and DL-Araliya. While these fonts enabled rapid print layout, they caused substantial data fragmentation in the Internet era because legacy text cannot be indexed by search engines or read by screen readers.

Akuru Tools was built to provide reliable, zero-latency, and privacy-respecting conversion utilities. Our goal is to empower journalists, legal professionals, graphic designers, and software engineers to transition seamlessly between legacy printing workflows and Unicode standards.

Architectural Principles

  • 100% Client-Side Execution: Your intellectual property, confidential documents, and private drafts never leave your device.
  • No Bloat: Built using Astro static generation, vanilla JavaScript, and pure CSS for maximum speed and accessibility.
  • Transparent Community Foundations: We build upon MIT-licensed algorithms contributed by the open-source community, crediting original authors with full license integrity.

System Information & Engine Details

1. What the Tool Does & Privacy Guarantee

Akuru Tools provides instant bidirectional conversion between standard Sinhala Unicode and FM Abhaya legacy font encoding.

Privacy Assurance: 100% of conversion logic executes directly inside your browser using vanilla JavaScript. Your text is never uploaded to any server, database, or third-party API. No tracking, accounts, or analytics scripts are used.

2. Conversion Engine Architecture

Text transformation is executed line-by-line to guarantee responsive UI behavior even on large text passages (hundreds of kilobytes):

  • FM Abhaya Legacy ↔ Unicode: Legacy-to-Unicode applies contextual rule transformations in a single regex pass, followed by greedy longest-match glyph substitution. Unicode-to-FM applies prefix vowel sign transposition (typing ෙ, ේ, ෛ, ො, ෝ, ෞ before consonants), handles rakaransha/yansaya suffix positioning, and provides yansaya conjunct fallback.

3. Testing & Documented Limits

  • Automated Verification: Validated against automated test suites, including comprehensive real-world passages and isolated word test vectors. The engine executes automated self-tests upon startup.
  • Multiple Valid Encodings: Certain Sinhala characters have multiple equivalent legacy keystrokes depending on specific typesetter layouts; output may differ from alternative tools while remaining typographically accurate.
  • Repaya Notice: Repaya (ර් + consonant) forms are not independently standardized across all legacy tables.
  • Beta Designation: Unicode → Legacy font conversion is strictly designated as Beta. Always proofread converted desktop publishing materials before final printing.

4. Engine & Font Information

  • FM Abhaya Font: Originally designed by Font Master (Fernando & Mudannayake / Pushpananda Ekanayaka). The FM Abhaya font file is proprietary and is neither hosted, distributed, nor bundled by Akuru Tools. If installed on your system, the browser natively applies it.
  • Akuru Tools Conversion Engine: Bespoke, custom bidirectional mapping engine created and maintained by Akuru Tools, audited and verified across 760+ Sinhala phoneme/vowel combinations and natural Sinhala text passages.