[en] Inspected with the precision of high resolution optical spectroscopy, atomic transition energies reveal the influence of nuclear properties. The high sensitivity achievable in laser spectroscopic methods allows the extraction of nuclear quantities even of artificially produced shortlived nuclides far off from nuclear stability. By analyzing the hyperfine structure and the isotope shift magnetic dipole moments, electric quadrupole moments and the change of the nuclear charge radius can be studied. The evaluation, however, depends to a large fraction on a complete description of the atomic physics involved. With the amount of available data constantly rising, atomic physics calculations are critically tested by the consistency or inconsistency with complementary data. In this paper, the authors report on experimental results concerning the isotope shift and hyperfine splitting of ^190-197Pb isotopes and ^188-196Tl. These measurements add a number of new isotopes to our earlier lead data and the data of the Karlsruhe group on ^197-214Pb and the Oak Ridge group on ^190-194Tl