Tamil OCR services
Scanned Tamil books, registers, court files and government records converted into accurate, searchable XML, EPUB or plain text — with a measured accuracy report for every batch.
Used in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and diaspora communities worldwide.
Figures from our 2002 electoral-roll project, run on Telugu and English scans.
Why Tamil OCR is harder than English
Generic OCR tools are built and benchmarked on Latin script. These are the specific things that break them on Tamil — and the things we had to solve to process 70,000 scanned PDFs into 10 lakh+ structured records.
Long, wide characters
Tamil letters are visually broader than Latin or Devanagari, and line and character segmentation tuned for other scripts cuts them badly.
The pulli dot decides the letter
A single dot above a consonant removes its inherent vowel. Lose the dot to compression artefacts and the word changes.
Old orthography in older books
Pre-reform typography uses letter forms replaced in modern printing. A back-list of Tamil literature will contain both, sometimes in one volume.
Grantha letters for loan words
Sanskrit and English loan words use extra Grantha characters that many OCR models were never trained on.
Tamil documents we handle
- Tamil literature and back-list books for EPUB
- Colonial-era administrative records
- Court judgments and case files
- Academic journals and theses
- Temple inscriptions and manuscripts
Typically for Tamil Nadu Archives, Connemara Library, universities, courts and Chennai publishers.
How a Tamil batch runs
- 1Ingest
Bulk PDF intake from any source — scans, photos, government portals. Page splitting, de-skew, de-noise.
- 2OCR in the right script
Models for Devanagari, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Odia, Urdu and Latin scripts, tuned on Indian government and publishing layouts: tables, multi-column, mixed scripts.
- 3Structure to XML
Fields, tables and hierarchy mapped to your schema — JATS, TEI, DocBook, ONIX, or a custom XSD. Validated on every file.
- 4Quality checks
Automated confidence scoring plus human review of low-confidence pages. You get an accuracy report, not a promise.
- 5Deliver & search
XML/EPUB/JSON/CSV delivery, or a ready-made search interface like the one we built for 2002 voter rolls.
Tamil OCR questions
- How accurate is Tamil OCR?
- It depends far more on scan quality than on the language. On clean modern print we reach high accuracy; on twenty-year-old photocopies the honest answer is that some pages need human review. We run a free 50-page sample of your own documents first and send you the measured accuracy before you commit to anything.
- Can you read handwritten Tamil?
- Handwriting is a separate and harder problem than print, and results vary with the hand. We assess it on your sample and tell you plainly whether it is viable, rather than promising and disappointing you later.
- What formats do I get back?
- Validated XML in your schema, EPUB 3, JSON, CSV or plain Unicode text — plus an accuracy report per batch. You own all output.
- Do you keep the table and page structure?
- Yes. For records like registers and land documents the structure matters as much as the text, so we map fields, rows and columns into your schema rather than dumping a wall of characters.
- Is my Tamil data sent outside India?
- No. Processing runs on our own Python pipeline on servers in India, and we do not upload your documents to third-party AI services without your written agreement.
Send 50 Tamil pages, free
You get back XML or text plus a measured accuracy report within a week. Then you decide.