Some tools are calculators. Some tools are bridges — between an old script and the modern web, between one calendar and another, between a payslip and a retirement fund. This week I added three of the bridge kind to RozKaTool — free, no sign-up, everything runs in your browser — and each one reaches a different country in Asia.

RozKaTool is now at 70 free tools, and the series keeps spreading: Nepal, Thailand, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Indonesia so far.

1. Bangladesh: Bijoy text is English letters wearing a Bangla mask

Bijoy is the legacy Bangla keyboard and font system used for decades in Bangladesh's print world — newspapers, books, office documents. It stores Bangla as ordinary English letters: the text Avwg only looks like আমি when the SutonnyMJ font is active. That works fine in Word and Photoshop, but the moment you paste it into Facebook, an email or a website, it shows up as random English letters.

Unicode gives every Bangla letter its own code, so it displays, searches and copies correctly everywhere, with no special font. The converter also has to reorder the text — Bijoy stores vowel signs in visual order, Unicode in logical order.

Bijoy ↔ Unicode Converter — paste old Bijoy (SutonnyMJ) text and get standard Unicode Bangla, or turn Unicode back into Bijoy for a print layout. It knows 200+ conjuncts — ক্ষ, জ্ঞ, স্ত্র — plus reph and the য-fola, and the result appears as you type. One honest warning, which the page says plainly: in Bijoy mode every Latin letter is treated as a Bijoy code, so convert Bangla-only passages and keep English text separate.

2. Nepal: you cannot convert BS to AD with a formula

Nepal's official documents use Bikram Sambat (BS), but passports, visa forms and universities ask for AD — and the two calendars don't line up neatly. BS runs about 56 years and 8 months ahead of AD, but the gap is 56 years in January to mid-April and 57 years after that. A BS month has 29 to 32 days, and the length changes every year. Subtracting 57 gets the year roughly right, but the day and month can be weeks out — and on a passport form, that is a wrong date of birth.

The only exact way is the published calendar table for each year, anchored at BS 2000 Baisakh 1 = 14 April 1943 AD. That's what this converter uses.

Nepali Date Converter — BS to AD or AD to BS, covering BS 2000–2083 (14 April 1943 – 13 April 2027 AD), with the weekday in English and Nepali. The day list adjusts itself, so a month with 29 days never offers a 30th. The page says plainly that dates after BS 2083 depend on the official calendar when it is published, and that results are for guidance — for a passport or visa, always check the date on your official document.

3. Sri Lanka: 23% of your earnings goes into retirement every month — but only 8% leaves your pay

Sri Lanka's retirement system is one of the most generous-looking splits in Asia, and also one of the easiest to misunderstand. Your employer deducts 8% EPF from your pay, adds 12% EPF of its own, and pays 3% ETF on top — so 23% of your earnings goes into your retirement funds every month. But only the 8% comes out of your salary; the other 15% is your employer's money on top of your pay.

The EPF is run by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. The ETF goes to the Employees' Trust Fund Board, and nothing is deducted from your salary for it. One detail the page gets right: EPF and ETF are calculated on total earnings — basic salary plus fixed allowances — and overtime is usually not included.

Sri Lanka EPF & ETF Calculator — enter your total monthly earnings and see your 8% deduction, your employer's 12% + 3%, the yearly totals and your take-home pay before tax. On Rs. 100,000 a month, that's Rs. 8,000 from you, Rs. 12,000 EPF + Rs. 3,000 ETF from your employer — Rs. 23,000 in total — and Rs. 92,000 pay before tax. Income tax (APIT/PAYE) is not included, and the page says so.

What building these keeps teaching me

The payslip calculators taught me that every country writes its own small story into a salary. These three taught me something wider: some tools aren't about numbers at all. They're about getting text from one script to another, a date from one calendar to another, and a retirement split that most people only half-understand. The rule is the same either way — start from the actual system, say where the limits are, and let the page tell the truth about what it doesn't do.

If you work with Bangla print text, a Nepali date on an official form, or a Sri Lankan payslip, try the tool for yourself and tell me if the result matches. And if there's a bridge your country needs that I haven't built yet, I'd like to hear about it.

All 70 tools are free at RozKaTool — PDF tools, image tools, calculators and Pakistan-specific tools like the bijli bill and salary tax calculators. No uploads, no sign-up, no server.