How to Fix Chanakya Font Showing as English in Photoshop & Premiere Pro

Why Chanakya Displays as English

If you have ever copy-pasted a Hindi paragraph into Photoshop, highlighted it, and changed the font to Walkman Chanakya—only to see it turn into a string of random English letters (like v vkWa fdl dks)—you are not alone. This is the single most common issue designers face when working with Hindi typography in Adobe CC.

This happens because Chanakya is a legacy non-Unicode font. It does not actually contain "Hindi bytes." Instead, it assigns Hindi letters to standard English keyboard keys. When you paste modern Unicode Hindi (like text copied from WhatsApp or Google Translate) into Photoshop, Photoshop tries to read the Unicode bytes using Chanakya's English mapping, resulting in gibberish.

How to Fix It Immediately

To fix this, you must convert the Unicode text into Chanakya's specific mapping before pasting it into your design software.

Step 1: Use a Converter

Take your original Hindi text (the one that reads perfectly online) and use the Unicode to Chanakya converter below.

Step 2: Convert the Text

Paste your text into the converter. It will output what looks like random English letters and symbols. This is normal! The converter is mapping the Hindi characters to the exact English keys that the Chanakya keyboard layout expects.

Step 3: Paste into Photoshop

Copy the converted (gibberish) text and paste it into your Photoshop or Premiere Pro text layer. (If your Hindi text is breaking apart completely in Premiere, you might need to change your text engine settings first. See our Premiere Pro text breaking fix guide).

Step 4: Apply the Font

Select the pasted text and change the font family to Walkman Chanakya 901 or 905. The gibberish will instantly transform into perfectly rendered, beautiful Hindi text.

A Note on Adobe's Text Engine

While newer versions of Adobe Photoshop (CC 2020+) have improved support for native Unicode Indic scripts (meaning you can use fonts like Mangal directly if you enable "Middle Eastern and South Asian" text engines), many professional DTP and printing houses still require Walkman Chanakya for its specific typographic style and legacy compatibility. In those cases, the conversion method above is the only reliable workflow.