Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

Tamil

U+0B80 – U+0BFF   (2944–3071)

The Tamil script is used for the Tamil language, which belongs to the Dravidian group and is used in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu and in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. You can find some real (non-Unicode) Tamil text to try at the Ananda Vitakan site, but you will need to download and install the Vikatan TrueType font in order to display it correctly. You can find out more about Tamil by visiting the Web Assisted Learning and Teaching of Tamil site, more about Tamil fonts and software by visiting Tamil Nation, and more about Tamil Unicode by visiting Sinnathurai Srivas&’s Tamil Unicode page. You can see some Unicode Tamil on the What is Unicode? in Tamil page, on the Trigeminal Software, Inc. (Tamil) page and on the Thisaigal Tamil e-zine Web site.

Microsoft Windows incorporates support for Tamil Unicode from Windows 2000 onwards. Apple&’s Mac OS X 10.4 incorporates support for Unicode Tamil from version 10.4 onwards. A product called Helawadana 2000 with Arichchuwadu claims to include Unicode-compatible fonts and to allow Tamil to be used in Windows applications. More information is available on the Microimage Web site.

Tamil Web pages with UTF-8 character encoding are supported by Internet Explorer 5 (or higher) under Windows 95 (or higher), and Netscape Navigator 7 and Mozilla for Windows also seem to be able to display Unicode Tamil.

The characters that appear in the first column of the following table depend on the browser that you are using, the fonts installed on your computer, and the browser options you have chosen that determine the fonts used to display particular character sets, encodings or languages.

You can find some or all of the characters in this range in the Windows Unicode fonts Aks Tamil Cheran, Akshar Unicode, Arial Unicode MS, ArulMathi_Unicode, Code2000, ETTamilNew, Fixedsys Excelsior, Free Idg Serif, Free Sans, Free Serif, InaiKathir_Unicode, InaiMathi_Unicode, JanaTamil, Latha, Samyak, Samyak Tamil, Saraswati5, SooriyanDotCom, Sun-ExtA, TabAvarangal2, TAU_1_ELANGO_Barathi, ThendralUni, TheneeUni, TheneeUniTx, TSCuthamba and VaigaiUni; and in the Macintosh OS X Unicode font InaiMathi.

To see exactly which characters are included in a particular font, you can use a utility such as Andrew West&’s BabelMap, or WunderMoosen&’s FontChecker.

If you are not familiar with the characters, you can check the characters displayed here with the graphical display at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0B80.pdf.

Copyright © 1999–2009 Alan Wood

The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 5.1.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–2008 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData.txt on the Unicode Web site (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in April 2008.

Created 3rd February 1999   Last updated 23rd December 2009