Vanavil to Unicode Converter

Convert a Vanavil Document Step by Step

1. Paste the stored Vanavil text above. Leave From set to Vanavil and To set to Unicode, even if the input looks like Latin letters.
2. For a Word file, choose Open file, under More on a phone, and select the .docx. Inspect the font list and select the Vanavil text to convert.
3. Read the preview, including names, vowel lengths, punctuation and numbers. Select the Unicode font for the converted document.
4. Copy the plain-text result or download the converted document. The original file stays unchanged, so keep it for comparison.

A font change alone does not repair legacy encoding. It changes how stored characters are drawn. This converter changes those characters into Unicode Tamil. If text already appears as Unicode Tamil in the input, it can pass through without needing a legacy conversion.

Vanavil vs Bamini: Check the Source Font

Both encodings use ordinary Latin positions for some Tamil glyphs. That overlap makes a short snippet a poor guide to its source. A correct-looking first word does not prove that the rest of a document uses the same mapping. Check the font name in the original document whenever it is available.

For example, Vanavil stores ழ as H, while Bamini uses o. Vanavil stores ஜ as #, ஹ as A and ஸ்ரீ as $. In Bamini those positions have different meanings. Vanavil also uses b for the short left vowel sign and n for the long one. Never substitute the Bamini table just because the text contains familiar keys.

The original font name is stronger evidence than automatic detection. Use the font converter to try another source if needed. Detection is a suggestion; shared codes can be ambiguous. Compare the result against the original, especially words containing the letters above.

Older Office Documents and Mixed Text

A Tamil Nadu IT Department letter dated 11 July 2017 records continued use of proprietary Vaanavil-Avvaiyar in government departments and directs conversion to Unicode. That explains why older office material may need conversion even when the page still looks readable in its original font.

A pasted paragraph loses its font boundaries. If English was typed in another font, the plain characters alone cannot tell the converter which words to leave unchanged. Use the Word conversion path for a mixed document when possible. It lets you choose the source fonts, and leaves unselected fonts alone. This page does not read the older binary .doc format.

Inspect the converted document before replacing anything. Check headings, tables, personal names and punctuation as well as the running text. A readable result can still contain a wrong vowel or a letter from another encoding. If only one section is wrong, check whether that section used a different source font.

How We Verified This Mapping

Our table comes from Tamil Virtual Academy's Vanavil.xml. We rendered all 369 source entries in the actual Avvaiyar font beside Unicode text in Noto Sans Tamil, and inspected the font's character map. All Tamil entries matched. The commercial font is used for verification only and is not supplied by this website.

The table includes two representations of some high-byte characters. This converter accepts both raw byte-style characters and their Windows-1252 equivalents, such as ‡ for ங. It writes the Windows-1252 form. Conflicting quote-normalization rules in the original table are omitted so punctuation stays intact. The full verification record documents the checks; automated checks cover all 247 Tamil letters, Grantha forms, a paragraph and Word conversion.