TSCII to Roman 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.

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 TSCII 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.