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Tamil font converter

Convert verified Bamini, TAB, TAM and TSCII 1.7 text to Unicode Tamil or back. Protect mixed text with passage selection and review actual conversion warnings.

Choose the exact font or encoding used in your document. It is not detected automatically.

For a document with English and Tamil, highlight only the passage to convert and choose Convert selection. Other text stays unchanged.

Import a text file

TXT only, up to 1 MB and 100,000 UTF-16 units after reading. Word/PDF formatting is not imported. UTF-8 and 8-bit files are different; choose the actual file encoding.

Select a passage to protect surrounding English, numbers or another font. No text is uploaded or saved automatically.

No passage selected.

The result will appear here after conversion.

Choose the source encoding, paste your text and convert.

Convert an old Tamil document carefully

  1. Find the font or encoding name in your source document. Choose that exact profile here; Latin-looking text alone cannot identify it.
  2. Paste a text passage or import a TXT file. Choose UTF-8 for a modern text file or 8-bit bytes for a legacy byte file.
  3. Choose the conversion direction. For mixed Bamini/TAM and English, highlight the Tamil passage and choose Convert selection.
  4. Proofread the result and review warnings and the reverse preview. Copy or download the result; keep your original document.

What each profile supports

Bamini supports the verified common forms in the documented mapping. Rare ஙு, ஙூ, ஞு and ஞூ forms are preserved with warnings rather than replaced by an ambiguous asterisk. Font variants may differ. TAB preserves ASCII English; unsupported Tamil numeral extensions are not guessed. TAM uses some Latin letter positions for Tamil, so choose the passage carefully. TSCII uses version 1.7; the earlier 1.6 byte for the independent இ vowel is not silently converted.

TSCII’s Sri spelling is explicit: the 2007 reference uses ஶ்ரீ, while older converters use ஸ்ரீ. Choose the spelling required by your workflow. The TSCII technical note, TAB note and TAM note describe these distinct encodings. These informational notes are references, not endorsements of this tool.

Read the review before using the result

Unknown characters stay in the output and appear in the review list. A draft download preserves them; it does not mean they were converted successfully. The reverse preview reconstructs the selected passage. A difference can come from ambiguous glyph sequences, alternate legacy spellings or Unicode normalization. A match cannot establish that the original font was identified correctly. Canonically decomposed Tamil vowel forms are accepted, but conversion back may use composed Unicode spelling.

Legacy output can look like Latin letters or punctuation until the matching font is applied in another program. UTF-8 TXT saves those carrier characters as Unicode; 8-bit TXT saves the actual legacy byte values. An 8-bit download is available only when the result is representable and the converted passage has no unmapped warnings. TXT carries no font formatting, and this tool does not convert DOCX/PDF layout.

Privacy and limits

All processing stays in your browser using a local worker. Input is limited to 100,000 UTF-16 units; file imports are limited to 1 MB. Conversion and import each have a 10-second deadline. Changing text or settings invalidates old output. Cancel preserves your input. Clear, examples and imports have one-step Undo replacement. The editor normalizes line endings to LF, and UTF-8 import removes a leading file marker. Input snapshots save the editor text as UTF-8; your source file is never modified. Up to 100 warning examples are retained, with the full warning count shown. No font is installed or included.

Mapping data is adapted with corrections from the MIT-licensed Android-TamilUtil source. License and attribution. This is legacy-font conversion, distinct from Unicode code-point and UTF-8 representation conversion.