SenTamil's Place in Tamil Publishing
SenTamil grew up in a different corner of the Tamil-computing world than Bamini. Where Bamini spread through newspapers and general DTP shops, SenTamil found its strongest foothold with book publishers and literary magazines — many Tamil printing presses and publishers historically accepted manuscripts only in SenTamil, which is why SenTamil-encoded files today skew toward novels, poetry collections, and periodicals rather than the newsletters and circulars you tend to find in Bamini.
Like every pre-Unicode Tamil encoding, it works by mapping Tamil glyphs onto ordinary ASCII keycodes — open the file without the SenTamil font installed and you get a wall of unrelated English letters and symbols.
SenTamil vs Bamini — Telling Them Apart
Both encodings produce garbled ASCII, and their outputs can look superficially similar to someone unfamiliar with either, but three checks resolve it reliably:
| Check | SenTamil | Bamini |
|---|---|---|
| Typical source | Books, literary magazines | Newspapers, general DTP, circulars |
| Font name in Word | "SenTamil", "Sen Tamil", "Stmzh" | "Bamini", "Bamini Kavi", "Bamini New" |
| Vowel-sign handling | Distinct glyph set for conjuncts | Simpler glyph reuse |
If the font name isn't available, the fastest test is simply pasting a line into FontConvertor.in and trying SenTamil, then Bamini, as the source — only the correct one will produce readable Tamil.
Step-by-Step: Convert SenTamil to Unicode
- Go to FontConvertor.in/font-converter.
- Select SenTamil as the source font.
- Select Unicode (UTF-8) as the target.
- Paste your SenTamil text — the Unicode output appears instantly.
- Copy or download as .txt, .html, or .docx.
The "Stmzh" Variant
Some SenTamil-era publishers used a closely related variant called Stmzh for certain layout software. If a small number of characters convert incorrectly after selecting SenTamil, try Stmzh as the source instead — it shares most of SenTamil's mapping but differs on a handful of punctuation and conjunct codes, which is enough to throw off a handful of words without making the whole passage unreadable.
Converting Mixed English–Tamil Documents
Literary manuscripts often interleave English words (author names, foreign terms, citations) with SenTamil Tamil text. Running the whole passage through the converter garbles the English portions, since every character is treated as SenTamil-encoded. Copy only the Tamil sections, convert those, and paste the Unicode result back into position — leave the English text untouched.
Direct SenTamil-to-Legacy-Font Conversion
If your destination is another legacy encoding rather than Unicode — for example, an old layout program that only accepts Bamini — select SenTamil as the source and the target legacy font directly. The converter handles SenTamil → Bamini, TSCII, TAM, Vanavil and the rest without a separate Unicode step.
FAQ
My converted text has odd spacing around conjuncts. This is usually a leftover manual line-break or hyphenation from the original layout software — clean it up after conversion rather than before.
Is SenTamil the same as "Sen Tamil" with a space? Yes, both refer to the same encoding — select SenTamil either way.