In the late 1990s and early 2000s, before Unicode became the global standard, developers created specific font sets to bypass the limitations of English-centric operating systems. "Kruti Tamil" and similar font series were instrumental in this era. These fonts worked by mapping Tamil characters onto the standard Latin keyboard layout (ASCII). While this allowed users to type in Tamil, it created a significant "silo" effect: a document typed in a specific Kruti font could only be read by someone who had that exact font installed. Without it, the text would appear as a meaningless string of English letters and symbols.