Thanks to Uthayanan Sethupathy for technical assistance.
Tamil is a syllabic alphabet in that it consists of consonants with vowel signs.
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display the correct characters. If you have difficulties, see list below for font and browser configuration instructions.
Read pages for instructions on whether it is Windows compliant or Linux compliant.
Note on OS X: These fonts can be installed on a Mac, but vowel marks may not display correctly.
See also
Browsers which support all Unicode are recommended. However, some vowel marks may be incorrectly placed depending on your font and platform.
OS X (10.4/Tiger): To view the correct vowel mark placement, copy and paste the text from the browser into TextEdit (free from Apple).
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of a South Asian script, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
In order to integrate foreign scripts into your computer, you must set up "keyboard" or input utilities in your operating system. These utilities will allow you to switch between typing English and other languages in word processors and Web tools. This process will also make sure the correct fonts are installed and available on your operating system.
The international word processor Global Writer is available in the Student Computing Labs. This allows users to easily switch keyboards, including phonetic keyboards which mimic a QWERTY keyboard.
CLC Student Computing Labs: To open Global Writer, go to the Start » International Language Support » Unitype Global Writer.
Global Writer is available from Unitype for personal purchase.
Microsoft provides a Tamil keyboard, but it may need to be installed from the Windows System disk. See the Windows Complex Scripts Keyboard Instructions for details on how to activate the keyboard. To see where the critical keys are, go to the Microsoft Keyboard Layouts Page.
Two Tamil keyboards – Anjal (somewhat phonetically based) and Tamil 99 – are avaialble in version 10.4, but are only fully compatible with Text Edit. See the instrcutions for activating Macintosh keyboards if you wish to use these.
The following applications most fully support vowel placements.
Apple does not currently have a keyboard for this script, but some alternate Tamil keyboards are available from Tom Gewicke.
For short texts, the Tamil Unicode Hex Codes may be of some use (these work with the Unicode Hex Keyboard). Print fonts are also widely available.
Note: Unicode fonts can be installed to view encoded Web pages. See the Browser Set Up section below for details
See the Unicode chart for Tamil to see OS X Hex codes, Windows XP ALT codes and HTML entity codes.Note that the correct Unicode font must be installed in order for the codes to work. See the Browsers Section for details.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are metadata tags which indicate the language of a page, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
One option is to use Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression or other Web editor and change the keyboard to the correct script. This will allow you to type content in directly with the appropriate script. However, it is important to verify that the correct encoding is specified in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign language text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression, and edited for formatting.
For Web tools such as Blogs at Penn State, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flicker, and others, users can typically change the keyboard and input text. In most cases, this content will be encoded as Unicode.
Unless a keyboard which supports Unicode is installed, you must use the Unicode chart for Tamil and enter HTML entity codes.
In some cases, your best options may be to use PDF files or image files. See the Web Development Tips section for more details.
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contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).
Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.
Last Modified: Monday, 29-Aug-2011 12:43:31 EDT