Tamil character picker v10

Notes:

Quick start

(You must have JavaScript enabled.) Choose a view (see below). Click on characters/shapes to insert text into the output field or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field). Any character with a dotted circle must be added after a suitable base character.

Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the tabs to get further information about the characters. You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow box to set preferences or search (regular expressions allowed - for example, to find the letter GA, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).

 

About the chart

Includes all the characters in the Unicode Tamil block as of Unicode 5.2.

All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)

Alternative views

The following alternative views are available by clicking just below the page title. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, default, shape, transcription or fontgrid.

Default This view is likely to be more useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Tamil.

Consonants are arranged, to the left, with native Tamil characters followed by Grantha characters. To their right are all the other characters. Independent vowels are at the top. Below these are the vowel signs. The bottom lines contain numbers 0-9 and related symbols. The aytham and some indic punctuation appear below the consonants, and more symbols appear on the far right.

Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity, and include groups of characters that interact to form new shapes (this is not an exhaustive list of shapes in Tamil writing, but may help locate most ligatures and conjuncts you don't recognise)..

Each orange key near the top of the page represents a significant part of the shape of two or more characters; as you mouse over the keys, characters and combinations of characters that incorporate that shape are displayed below. Click on these characters to add them to the output. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other.

The shapes below the grey line are a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.

The shapes include combinations of consonant plus vowel only where the result is significantly different from the combination of nominal shapes.

A small orange plus sign to the right of a shape indicates that you will find similar shapes after the large plus sign to the right of the current line. These characters may cause confusion because they share elements, or because their shape may be similar, though not quite the same.

Transcription I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonetic transcriptions.

The large characters on a grey background represent characters used by ISO 15919. To type Tamil text starting from a transcription, click on these characters. If there is only one Tamil character corresponding to the transcription letter, it is inserted directly into the output field. If there are multiple alternatives, these are presented to you in a selection list: click on the Tamil character you need in the selection list and it is added to the output.

Each Tamil character is associated with a phonetic symbol (a Latin/IPA symbol on white background to its left in the selection lists). If there is more than one possible phonic representation you will see the selection list divided appropriately. As you select characters, the phonetic symbol to its left is stored. If you click on the Phonemes button, below the output area, these are all added to the output. This provides a quick way of generating a phonetic transcription from a Latin transcription. In some cases a Tamil character is repeated within the same selection list because it has more than one possible phonetic equivalent - in such cases, choose the right one if you want to generate this phonetic transcription.

Just above the output area there is a line of Latin characters. This represents the union of all transcription and phonetic characters, and is provided in case you wish to just type in a transcription directly.

For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.

As you mouse over the Latin characters on the grey background, the corresponding Tamil characters are also displayed near the top of the page. This is to aid in searching, but you can also select characters from there.

Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).

Other commands

Latn>>Tam This tab will convert text writing in Latin transliterated form (per ISO 15919, following the main table here) to Tamil characters, and add the result to the end of the text in the output area. By default, all the text in the output area is converted, but you can also select a range of characters for conversion by just highlighting them with the mouse.

Tam>>Latn This tab will convert text writing in Tamil to Latin transliterated form (per ISO 15919, following the main table here), and add the result to the end of the text in the output area. By default, all the text in the output area is converted, but you can also select a range of characters for conversion by just highlighting them with the mouse.

Phonemes While you click on Tamil characters in the Transcription view, the picker automatically records in a buffer the phonetic symbol to the left of that character. Clicking on the Phonemes tab will dump those collected symbols into the output area at the current cursor position, and clear the buffer. It is quite basic (for example, it doesn't take into account use of the delete key), but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Tamil characters and the phonetic transcription.

As mentioned above, graphics are provided for unwritten vowel sounds to help produce these transcriptions. They produce no output in Tamil script, but the phonemic value is stored in the buffer.

Other info For further information about features of the tool or user interface, see How to use..

Useful URIs

Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Wazu Japan, Alan Wood

Tamil script description in Wikipedia

My notes on the Tamil script

Tamil in UniView

Other pickers

If something is missing

... let me know.