In Web today there are plethora of Encoding used for Tamil including TAB/TAM (Tamilnadu Govt. standard), TSCII (popular 8bit), TUNE and more. For each of these sites you need to download and install respective fonts, definitely a pain. Recently I found this Firefox Addon [higopi.com/adhiyan] that aims to solve this problem. After downloading and installing this addon “Adhiyan” – press Alt-2 (for TSCII), Alt-5 (for TAB) and it changes the text in the page to Unicode. So without installing the respective fonts, you can read all the text in Unicode. Since it finds and replaces characters in the webpage, not all pages come out correctly. But still a very handy utility.
This Add on – Padma for Indic scripts has an auto transform option for Tamil. It also support few more languages though it support only Manual transform them.
With this, we don’t have to remember whether the site is in TAM or TAB. Only downside is while replacing with Unicode Latha, the size is little bigger when auto transformed.
http://padma.mozdev.org/
Regards,
Sathish Kumar K