TSCII to Bamini Converter

TSCII (Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange) is a standardized 8-bit encoding scheme for Tamil, developed by the Tamil Internet community as an alternative to proprietary encodings.

History

TSCII was developed in 1999 by a group of Tamil computing enthusiasts and standardized through community consensus. It was designed as an open standard to facilitate Tamil computing before Unicode became widely supported.

Usage

TSCII was popular for email communication, early Tamil websites, and document exchange in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many Tamil e-books and online libraries still contain TSCII-encoded content.

Characteristics

TSCII uses the upper half of the 8-bit character space (128-255) for Tamil characters while keeping ASCII intact. This allows mixing of English and Tamil text without encoding conflicts.

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 TSCII 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.