Bamini to Unicode Converter
Paste legacy Bamini text and get readable Unicode Tamil — the kind that displays on any phone, website or modern document without installing a font.
Working the other way? Unicode to Bamini is on the home page, and the Tamil font converter covers Vanavil as well.
How to Convert Bamini to Unicode
- Copy the Bamini text Select the text in your document or email and copy it. Do not change the font first — the Latin characters are the data.
- Paste it on the left The output box on the right updates as you type, so a short sample is enough to confirm you are on the right track.
- Check a known word Compare one word you can read in the original, such as
jkpo;for தமிழ். If that comes out right, the rest of the paragraph will too. - Copy the Unicode result Paste it into the destination app and switch to a Unicode Tamil font — Noto Sans Tamil, Latha or Nirmala UI. No special font is needed after conversion.
What Bamini Text Looks Like
Bamini is not a language or a transliteration scheme; it is a font that draws Tamil
letters where a normal font would draw Latin ones. The document still contains Latin
characters, which is why a page typed in Bamini turns into readable Tamil the moment
somebody changes the font — and why it turns back into jkpo; when the font is
missing.
That is also the reason this converter can work at all: it reads the Latin characters and maps each known sequence to the Tamil cluster the font would have drawn. Common tells:
;marks a pulli (்), sof;is க்;nandNsit before a consonant for ெ and ே;- capital letters usually mean a long vowel or a ு/ூ form;
- digits and punctuation may have been remapped as well.
Common Reasons a Conversion Looks Wrong
- The source is a PDF or an image. Copying from a PDF gives you the visual glyphs, not Bamini codes, so the result will be nonsense. Convert the original Word file instead.
- Mixed English and Tamil. In Bamini a Latin letter is a Tamil letter, so an English word inside the text decodes as Tamil. Convert the Tamil portion on its own.
- An older or modified font. A handful of clusters have no dedicated key in some Bamini builds; those are the cases where our output may differ by one character.
- Text copied with smart quotes. Word sometimes substitutes curly quotes for the straight characters the font expects; retype the punctuation if a word breaks.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I tell that a text is in Bamini?
Bamini stores Tamil as Latin letters, so the text looks like a strange English word with punctuation mixed in: jkpo; is தமிழ், tzf;fk; is வணக்கம். The giveaway is the semicolon, which Bamini uses for the pulli, together with brackets and capital letters scattered through what should be a word.
Why is the converted text still unreadable?
In most cases the text was never Bamini but a PDF or image that only looks like Tamil. Copying from a PDF usually yields the glyph shapes, not the underlying characters, and no character-level converter can undo that. If the text is genuinely Bamini, check that you pasted the whole word — a missing semicolon merges two letters.
Does it matter which Bamini version I used?
A few code positions differ between Bamini releases, and Tamil font families derived from it (Bamini Roman, Bamini Bold and similar) can disagree on rare clusters. If one character comes out wrong, compare it with the character chart and tell us which font build you used.
Can I convert a whole Word or PDF document?
Paste the text itself, not a screenshot: select the text in Word, copy, and paste it into the input box. Formatting, tables and images are not converted — only the Tamil characters. For long documents, convert a paragraph first to confirm the font, then continue section by section.
Is the conversion done on your server?
No. The converter is a script that runs in your browser, so the text is never uploaded. That also means it works offline once the page has loaded, and that we cannot see or recover anything you paste.
Accuracy
The engine passes 135/135 of its fixed self-test cases, including 127 that are cross-checked against published Bamini key charts and the Open-Tamil reference tables. The known limitations are listed on the home page instead of being hidden, and corrections are welcome at service@unicodebamini.com.
Unicode to Bamini Converter
The opposite direction: turn Unicode Tamil into Bamini text for PageMaker, CorelDRAW or older Word documents.