ABC-Zwsp to Unicode — Khmer Legacy Font Converter

About this tool

For years, Cambodian offices typed their documents in legacy Khmer fonts — Limon for NGO reports and school handouts, ABC and Khek for ministry circulars and print-shop layouts. A file saved in one of those fonts does not contain Khmer characters at all: it stores Latin byte codes that only draw Khmer letters while the matching font is installed. Copy a paragraph out of one today and you get strings like `sYsþI` instead of សួស្តី — unsearchable, untranslatable, unreadable on any device that lacks the font. This page converts that legacy text into Unicode Khmer, the encoding every modern phone, browser and website reads — Limon to Unicode, ABC-Zwsp to Unicode and Khek to Unicode, all from the same pane. Pick the encoding yourself or leave the selector on Auto-detect: the Limon to Unicode path, the ABC-Zwsp path and the Khek path each apply their own byte table, and the detector picks the one whose decode looks like real Khmer. Everything runs in your browser — paste the legacy text, press Convert, copy or download the result. What it does not do: it does not translate meaning, it does not render legacy fonts on screen, and it does not go from Unicode back to a legacy encoding — the paired Unicode to legacy converter handles that direction. Characters with no entry in the chosen table pass through unchanged and are counted for you, never guessed at.

How it works

Pressing Convert runs a pure function in your browser — convertLegacyToUnicode in lib/khmer-legacy-converter/converter.ts — with the encoding you selected. Under Auto-detect, the page first decodes your text under each of the three tables and scores how plausible each result is as real Khmer: a wrong table produces consonant clusters that cannot exist, like a subscript sign glued to a letter that has no subscript form, or vowel signs floating with no base consonant, so the highest-scoring table is usually the right one. The conversion pass then walks your text matching the longest known byte sequence first — legacy fonts pack some Khmer glyphs into two- and three-byte combinations that a naïve one-byte map scrambles — before falling back to the single-byte table. Those bytes decode in visual order, whereas Unicode demands logical order, so a reorder pass (reorder.ts: unicodeReorder) arranges every cluster the way Unicode specifies — subscripts, vowel signs and shifters land where a search box expects them. Characters the table does not define pass through unchanged and appear in the unmapped-characters chip under the output. Inputs over 10 KB convert inside a Web Worker so the page stays responsive; smaller text runs on the main thread. Your text never leaves the browser — the only telemetry is an anonymous usage event carrying counters such as length and unmapped count, never the text itself.

Use cases

• Opening an old .doc or .pdf and seeing garbled characters like sYsþI bgb¥Ún — paste the legacy text and get clean សួស្តី បងប្អូន back.
• A librarian digitising pre-2010 Cambodian publications whose source files are Limon-encoded and whose target repository requires Unicode text.
• A government officer migrating a Khek-encoded form template into a modern Unicode-based document system.
• A developer importing a legacy CSV of Cambodian records whose Khmer name column is Limon bytes, needing Unicode for a modern search index.
• A website team moving a Limon-era blog over to a current CMS that requires Unicode for proper indexing and rendering.
• A translator receiving a Khmer source file in ABC-Zwsp and needing clean Unicode to paste into a CAT tool.
• A researcher processing a corpus of 1990s–2000s Khmer newspapers whose text follows the original Limon encoding.

Verified conversion examples

Frequently asked questions

• What is the ABC-Zwsp encoding?

  ABC-Zwsp is a variant of the ABC legacy Khmer font family that marks word boundaries with a dedicated separator byte instead of a plain space — you will see dots or unusual punctuation between words in raw ABC-Zwsp text. It shares much of its glyph table with the rest of the ABC family, so its documents are common in archives that standardised on ABC fonts.

• Why does my ABC text show dots or odd characters between words?

  Those are the Zwsp word markers the encoding inserts where a space would go — the ABC-Zwsp format keeps an explicit byte for every word boundary. The converter translates each marker into a real space, so the Unicode output reads with normal spacing instead of the separators the font used internally.

• How do I tell ABC-Zwsp apart from Limon or Khek text?

  The three encodings overlap on many byte assignments, which is exactly why this page offers auto-detect: it decodes your text under each table and scores which result looks like valid Khmer clusters. ABC-Zwsp stands out by its word-separator bytes — dense dots or marker characters between every word — and auto-detect usually resolves it correctly on a paragraph or more.

• Will the word separators survive the conversion?

  They are not lost — they become normal spaces, which is what they represented. The ABC-Zwsp marker exists so the legacy font could break words visually without a real space character; Unicode Khmer has its own word-boundary convention, so the converter emits the correct boundary character and drops the legacy marker byte.

Data and accuracy

Content last reviewed 8 November 2026