Language
The eTamil font
ican qamiz, the font in which the ASCII letters carry Tamil glyphs. Free to download, under the SIL Open Font License.
ican qamiz
In this font the ASCII letters carry Tamil glyphs. c draws ச, q draws த,
Z draws ன — one glyph for each letter, following the eTamil transliteration.
A developer who installs it types Tamil upon an ordinary keyboard and reads it
back as Tamil, while what is stored upon disk remains ASCII.
| Family | ican qamiz |
| Version | 2.1.1 |
| Licence | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Designer | Esan Maruff |
| Coverage | ASCII and Latin-1; the Tamil block is not covered |
Installing it
Download the file and install it as you would any font: on Windows, right-click
and choose Install; on macOS, open it and choose Install Font; on Linux, copy it
to ~/.local/share/fonts and run fc-cache -f.
The VS Code extension carries the same file and installs it for you — eTamil: Install the eTamil font — and then draws the ASCII that is eTamil in it while English stays Latin.
What it does not cover
The font maps 129 code points, all of them ASCII and Latin-1, and not one character of the Tamil block. This is deliberate rather than incomplete: the font exists to give the ASCII letters Tamil shapes, and Unicode Tamil is drawn by whatever face the editor is already using. An editor should therefore keep its ordinary font as the base and draw only the eTamil-script ASCII in this one, which is what the extension does.
Further faces — a monospaced build, and fonts for applications beyond the editor — are in preparation.