Bamini to Keyman Converter

Bamini is one of the most widely used Tamil font encodings, particularly popular in Sri Lanka and among the Tamil diaspora. It uses ASCII character positions to represent Tamil characters.

History

Bamini was developed in the early 1990s as a practical solution for typing Tamil on computers before Unicode support became widespread. It became the de facto standard for Tamil publishing in Sri Lanka and was extensively used in newspapers, books, and official documents.

Usage

Bamini encoding is still found in legacy documents, older websites, and archival materials. Many Tamil newspapers and publishers in Sri Lanka continue to maintain Bamini-encoded archives. Converting to Unicode is essential for modern accessibility.

Characteristics

Bamini maps Tamil characters to the ASCII range (32-127), using lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols to represent Tamil script. It requires the Bamini font to be installed for proper display.

Keyman encoding is associated with the Keyman keyboard software, which provides phonetic Tamil input capabilities.

History

Keyman was developed by SIL International to enable typing in various languages including Tamil, using intuitive phonetic keyboard layouts.

Usage

Keyman encoding might be found in documents created using Keyman keyboard software before direct Unicode output was standard.

Converting between Bamini and Keyman allows you to work with documents across different systems and applications that use these encodings.

For best results, we recommend converting legacy encodings to Unicode first, which provides universal compatibility and can then be converted to any other format as needed.