Unicode Issues & Solutions

Before proceeding to see below the various issues related to Unicode, we suggest you to please enable Unicode in your system. Enabling Unicode helps you achieve various advanced and powerful operations related to Unicode. Click here to know how to enable Unicode in your system (Win98, WinME, Win2K, WinXP, WinVista). If you do not enable Unicode, you may not be able to view unicode Tamil characters properly in certain applications and you will see only question marks or squares or disjointed Tamil characters.

· If characters appear as squares in MS-Word and as disjointed characters in MS-Powerpoint while typing in unicode Tamil in WinXP/2K, then click here to effect some settings and then start typing in them correctly following the procedure given.

· In MS Word 2007, if there are problems typing certain words alone (like 'jananam' etc. - where a particular uyirmey repeats itself sequentially), then it has nothing to do with Azhagi. It's because of 'sequence checking' in MS-Word. So, please do the following:

- You will get a popup menu
- In that, select 'Customize Quick Access Toolbar' option
- In the left side, choose 'Advanced' option
- Now, uncheck 'Use sequence checking'

Thereafter, you won't face problems typing any Tamil word. You may come across this problem with some other applications too. So, try to go through the correct menu options in whatever application in which you face this specific problem and uncheck/disable 'sequence checking'.

· Office 2000 and earlier versions may not support Unicode typing using Azhagi even after effecting various settings. To resolve the issue, you may have to upgrade to Office 2002 and later versions.

· Not all applications support Unicode. So, even after you effect all the settings, when you try to type in Unicode in such applications, you might only see question marks or boxes or disjointed Tamil characters appearing in them, either at all places or at certain places.

· All popular web-based email clients like Gmail, Yahoo! mail and Hotmail offer Unicode support. Of these, one can say that the support offered by Google is total. For more information, please read the section below on 'Web Browser Related' issues.

· As far as internal email clients are concerned, we can talk only of Outlook Express which is the only email client we use. For more information on these, click here.

· Google offers full support for Unicode whereas Yahoo! classic* does not. So, if your Unicode Tamil mails or group messages are not visible in Tamil in Yahoo! classic, you might have to do the following in your web browser:

· (*) There are 2 interfaces which Yahoo! mail provides - classic and modern. If you switch over to the modren interface (which seems to be providing 100% Unicode support), then the Tamil characters may be straightaway visible without having to resort to 'View->Encoding->Unicode (UTF-8)'.

· Even after setting up Unicode correctly in your system, some Unicode sites (probably those that are not using dynamic unicode fonts to render their web pages) may not be displaying Unicode Tamil characters correctly, esp. the "uyirmey" forms of the Tamil letters. To resolve this issue, do the following:

· If you are viewing an unicode webpage offline or statically (as opposed to viewing it dynamically), all browsers in Win98/WinME need at least one unicode Tamil font to be installed, apart from the presence of a compatible version of usp10.dll, to display the Tamil characters. For more details, click here .

· In case of dynamic Tamil web pages (using the MS supported .eot type dynamic font and not .pfr) viewed online, IE does not require any unicode font to be installed in the Win98/ME system whereas Firefox/Netscape does require a font.

· If you use Firefox and if unicode Tamil characters are seen properly for some sites but not for other sites, it will be most probably because of the other sites having Tamil texts in "full justified" alignment. Firefox does not render (as of now) Tamil unicode webpages properly if the pages contain fully justified Tamil text. If you failed to see Firefox display unicode Tamil characters properly despite various attempts, then please use IE. Further, the future version(s) of IE is supposed to incorporate all the advantageous and user-friendly features of Firefox, plus much more.

· Older versions of Yahoo! Messenger do not support Unicode. Do note that MSN messenger and GoogleTalk do support Unicode.

To get answers for various other frequently asked questions on Unicode, please join our Yahoo Group (this is our Primary Online Forum) at:

There is another non-technical group http://groups.google.com/group/illam just for Tamil postings alone - on Spirituality, Literature, Sofwares etc. etc. Messages will be always posted in the universally visible Unicode Tamil only. You can view the group messages at any time without joining the group. To post comments, you have to join the group.

While joining any of the groups above, you can always opt for 'No Email' option and see all the messages posted, over the net itself.