Dinakaran to Bamini Converter

Dinakaran encoding was developed for the Dinakaran newspaper, one of the leading Tamil daily newspapers.

History

The Dinakaran newspaper developed its own encoding system to meet the demanding requirements of daily newspaper production and typesetting in the pre-Unicode era.

Usage

Dinakaran encoding is primarily found in the newspaper's digital archives and related publications. The encoding was specifically optimized for their production workflow.

Characteristics

Dinakaran encoding includes specialized character mappings optimized for newspaper headline and body text composition.

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.

Converting between Dinakaran and Bamini 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.