Lekh Patro — Nepali Typing, Translation, Calendar & Tools
Type Nepali without a Nepali keyboard: write romanized Nepali — kasto chha
— and Lekh Patro converts it to Devanagari — कस्तो छ — as you type, IME-style.
It also translates English ↔ Nepali (photos and documents too), carries a
Bikram Sambat calendar with festivals, and has a Tools tab for dates, money,
Preeti and a phrasebook.
What it does
Four tabs — Type, Translate, Patro and Tools:
- Type — a phonetic transliteration engine backed by a 1,174-entry
dictionary shows suggestion chips (with spelling variants) as you type.
The chips also draw on the 45,000 most common words of the Nepali
Wikipedia, matched by sound, so a loose spelling still finds the word
(
bikas → विकास, diunso → दिउँसो).
The dictionary knows the English words people mix in (school → स्कुल,
facebook → फेसबुक) and the way people actually text (tapaailai →
तपाईंलाई, vayo → भयो). A searchable Devanagari cheat sheet covers the long
tail, and tapping a cell echoes the result inside the sheet so you can see
the letter land without closing it. Paste text copied out of an old Preeti
document and it offers to convert it to Unicode on the spot; going the
other way, "Copy as Preeti" (or a live Preeti strip under the text) gives
you the keys for an old Preeti-font file. Works with
mobile keyboards/IMEs (Gboard-style commit flow).
- Translate — English ↔ Nepali with a Google-style language switcher.
Type directly or drop in a photo, PDF, DOCX, or TXT file — OCR happens
entirely in the browser via
Tesseract.js, and nothing is
uploaded to any server. Online translation by default (Google's free
endpoint first; when it refuses, Lekh's own
/api/translate function
translates with an open model on Groq, then MyMemory), plus an optional
fully on-device NLLB-200 model
(Transformers.js) —
private and offline-capable once cached (large download, fetched in
phases with progress). Every Nepali translation carries a plain-Latin
pronunciation line under it (कृपया मलाई ठमेल लैजानुहोस् → Kripaya malai
thamel laijanuhos), and Show holds it up full-screen in large type for
a taxi driver or shopkeeper.
- Patro — a Bikram Sambat calendar with festivals, public holidays and
tithi. About 70 festivals and national days also have an English name, a
line on what happens and, where it matters, a note for visitors ("offices,
banks and many shops close from Fulpati until after Tika") — written by
hand, see below. No ads, no account.
- Tools — four small tools behind one switcher, so the tab shows the one
you picked rather than a long scroll of all of them: a BS ↔ AD date
converter; Money, which writes an amount out in words for a cheque or
reads a price you can't (
१२,५००.५० → बाह्र हजार पाँच सय रुपैयाँ पचास पैसा
मात्र, in Nepali and English, lakh/crore grouping) and converts at Nepal
Rastra Bank's daily rates for the 22 currencies it quotes (the buying rate
into rupees, the selling rate out of them, the rupee figure in words too,
and the last rates kept for offline use); Preeti ↔ Unicode, which
also notices romanized Nepali pasted into it; and an offline phrasebook for travellers — 43 phrases in five
topics, searchable, each with its pronunciation and a full-screen Show,
under the emergency numbers (Police 100, Tourist Police 1144, Ambulance
102, Fire 101) as tap-to-dial links.
How the romanization maps
Lekh types the way ashesh.com.np's romanized Nepali Unicode
converter does — the pattern most
Nepali typists already know — so the same keystrokes give the same letters.
Common words come from Lekh's own dictionary first (reviewed by a native
speaker), the way ashesh keeps one too; everything else follows the pattern.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
