Garbled Hindi from a PDF? Blame the old font

Why does Hindi turn into gibberish when I copy it from a PDF?

Because what you see and what is stored are different things. Many older Hindi documents were made with fonts from before Unicode. Unicode is the modern standard that gives every character in every language its own code. Without it, a font could draw any shape it liked under any code.

Fonts such as Kruti Dev reused the codes for English letters. So the code for an English letter was drawn as a Devanagari shape.

On screen you read Hindi. Underneath the PDF holds the English-keyboard characters that were typed. When you copy, you get those characters, not Hindi.

How can I tell that an old font is the cause?

Paste the copied text into a plain note. If you see a mix of English letters, digits and symbols where Hindi should be, it is almost certainly a legacy font. Real Hindi from a modern PDF pastes as Devanagari.

The example below is illustrative, not taken from a real document. The first line is what the page shows. The second is the kind of text you might get when you copy it.

नमस्ते, आप कैसे हैं?
ueLrs] vki dSls gSa\

Another clue: open the file's properties in your PDF viewer and look at the font list. A name such as Kruti Dev points to the problem.

What are my two options?

There are two ways to get real Hindi out. Which one to pick depends on whether you know the font and whether the PDF has a text layer at all.

1. Use a font converter. If you know the font (for example Kruti Dev), paste the garbled text into a converter built for that font. It maps the Latin codes back to Unicode Hindi. This works only for fonts the converter supports, and long documents need care.
2. Read the page image with OCR. OCR (optical character recognition) looks at how the page appears and writes the letters it sees, so the old font mapping does not matter. This also works when the font is unknown, and when the PDF is a scan with no text layer at all.

What should I check after getting the text?

Check the vowel signs. In Devanagari, a matra is a vowel sign written above, below or beside a consonant, such as the marks in कि and की. Matras are small, and they are the first thing to go wrong in both converters and OCR. Look at each one against the page.

Also check conjuncts, where two consonants join into one shape (for example क्ष and त्र), and check any numbers. Read a page aloud against the original if you can. Our Hindi OCR guide lists the usual trouble spots.

Does the same happen in Urdu and Tamil?

Yes, the same class of problem appears elsewhere. InPage, widely used for Urdu publishing, stored text in its own format, and many older Tamil documents use legacy fonts too. The page looks perfect and the copied text is meaningless.

The remedy is the same: either convert with a tool made for that font, or read the page image. For why these scripts are hard in general, see why some scripts are harder for OCR.

When is this guide not the answer?

If your copied Hindi is real Devanagari but the order or spacing is odd, that is a different problem. And if the PDF is a scan, there is no font to blame; see how to tell scanned from digital. For a poor-quality scan, a clearer photo will help more than any converter.