Bamini to Roman 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.

Roman transliteration encoding represents Tamil using Latin alphabet characters, making it accessible for those without Tamil font support.

History

Roman transliteration systems for Tamil have existed since colonial times but were standardized for computing to enable Tamil communication in ASCII-only environments.

Usage

Roman Tamil is still used in SMS, chat applications, social media, and situations where Tamil fonts are unavailable or impractical.

Converting between Bamini and Roman 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.