Tamil in android

Displaying tamil characters in android can be easily achieved by using TSCII (Tamil Standard Code for Information Interchange) fonts. TSCII is an extended ASCII encoding standard. Unlike ASCII which uses 7 bits for encoding, TSCII makes use of all the 8 bits in a byte. The first 128 bytes remains the same as that of ASCII.  The tamil vowels and consonants along with the common prefixes, suffixes and other special characters fill up the rest of the 128 bytes.

You can place the TSCII font in the assets folder of your android application and set it to any view where you need to display tamil text.

Typeface tf = Typeface.createFromAsset(context.getAssets(), "fonts/tscFont.ttf");

TextView textView = new TextView(context);

textView.setTypeface(tf);

If you have the text in unicode format, there are online tools available that can help you convert the tamil text from unicode to TSCII format and vice versa.