Reading Tamil texts in old script.

Tamil Script had undergone a reform on select characters to bring uniformity and simplify the writing style in 1960’s. The table below shows the old way of writing on the left and the current way on the right. I have mild memories of seeing bus boards having னை in சென்னை(Chennai) in its old form with elephant’s trunk during early 90’s.

Classical and Modern script

Now its possible to read texts in their old form digitally, thanks to the newly released Lohit-Tamil-Classical font. Announcemnt Download link

Having classical fonts will not only help giving the user the feel of reading historical texts the way they were written, but will also be probably making digitisation of old texts simpler with OCR solutions.

Copyright notes: “Simplified tamil script” by User:Avedeus, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons