TAB to Bamini Converter

TAB (Tamil Bilingual) encoding was developed for bilingual Tamil-English computing, allowing seamless mixing of both scripts in a single document.

History

TAB encoding was created in the early 1990s to address the need for bilingual document creation in Tamil Nadu's government and educational sectors where both Tamil and English are official languages.

Usage

TAB encoding was used in government offices, educational institutions, and businesses that required frequent Tamil-English document creation. Legacy systems may still contain TAB-encoded files.

Characteristics

TAB encoding allocates specific byte ranges for Tamil characters while preserving standard ASCII for English, enabling true bilingual text processing.

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 TAB 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.