bamini

Bamini is a widely used proprietary Tamil font and encoding system that predates the universal adoption of Unicode for Tamil text. It provides a way to type Tamil on computers through an ASCII-based input method in which sequences of Latin letters map to Tamil glyphs. The Bamini package typically includes a font file and a keyboard layout, and it was especially popular in the 1990s and early 2000s among publishers, printers, and educational institutions in Tamil-speaking regions. Text saved in Bamini encoding requires the Bamini font to display correctly; without the font, it often renders as garbled characters.

Because Bamini uses a non-Unicode encoding, converting Bamini-encoded documents to Unicode generally requires a dedicated converter that maps each Bamini sequence to its Unicode Tamil equivalent. While Unicode Tamil fonts and input methods have become the standard, Bamini remains part of the history of Tamil computing and can still appear in legacy documents and older publishing workflows. The rise of Unicode has led to a decline in new Bamini usage, though its influence is noted in discussions of Tamil typography and digital history. Support tools and conversion utilities continue to help users migrate content from Bamini to Unicode, facilitating interoperability with modern systems and standards. See also Tamil typography, Tamil Unicode, and font converters.