PowerGeez to Unicode
Your PowerGeez file still has the Amharic in it
PowerGeez was how Ethiopian offices typed for years. What it saved was never Amharic — it was Latin letters, with the PowerGeez font drawing Amharic shapes over the top. Open it on a machine without that font and the document shows you what it actually holds. Nothing is lost. The file just needs translating into the right characters.
ሰነድ
Convert your PowerGeez document
Drop the file here, or paste the broken text. The converter reads the bytes and lists the readings that fit, and marks the PowerGeez one if the document offers it. The choice stays yours: nothing but the words themselves can tell you which reading is right.
This converter runs inside your browser, so it needs JavaScript. Everything else on this page is here without it.
Or drop the file onto this card. A file gives the document’s exact bytes; a paste gives whatever your machine made of them on the way to the clipboard — usually the same thing.
Pick a reading above and it appears here.
The document never leaves this browser. There is no upload, no server and nothing kept: the tables are part of this page, and the conversion runs on your own machine.
Is it actually PowerGeez?
Open the document, select the broken letters and look at what the font box says. If it names one of these, it is PowerGeez. All three are the same encoding drawn at different weights, so it does not matter which of them your file asks for — the reading is the same.
Geez1.ttfGeez2.ttfGeez3.ttf
The converter is built on Ge'ez 2 Normal — every mapping was drawn in that font and checked against the character it claims to be.
If the font box says Visual Geez instead, you want the other page — there are two Visual Geez encodings, and they read the same bytes differently.
Telling PowerGeez from Visual Geez takes no guessing. The two share 178 byte sequences and read 167 of them differently, so a single paragraph settles it — one reading comes out as words and the other comes out as nothing.
What the converter knows about PowerGeez
298
byte mappings
280
Amharic characters reached
Every mapping comes from PowerGeez’s own typing tables, and each one was then drawn in the font and compared against the character it claims to be. Where the picture disagreed, the mapping was not published — which is why the converter tells you it could not read a byte instead of guessing at it.
The one place the machine got it wrong
Of the 298 mappings, exactly one rests on a person’s judgement rather than on the picture comparison. The bytes are 25 45. The comparison picked the shape that scored closer, and the shape it picked carries the wrong vowel mark. Anyone who reads Amharic sees it instantly: one of the two belongs to a word written every day, and the other belongs to no word at all. So ኋ is what was published.
25 45ኋThe typing you already know
Anyone with PowerGeez documents has usually typed in PowerGeez as well. The scheme Ezra uses is derived from it, so most of what your fingers already know still works. There are two places the two differ — both measured and written down — and the rule behind the seven forms is on the key reference page.
Questions
- Do I need the PowerGeez font to read my document?
No. Installing the font makes the old document readable on that one machine. Converting it makes the text readable everywhere — on a phone, in email, in any browser — and searchable too.
- Is my document uploaded anywhere?
No. The conversion runs inside your browser. The file never leaves your machine, and the converted text stays there until you copy or download it.
- Can I drop in a Word document?
The converter reads text, and the inside of a .doc or .docx file is not only text. Open the document, copy the broken letters and paste them here instead. A plain text file can be dropped straight in.