CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 7: Typography

Vietnamese typeface issues

A fully functional Vietnamese font, one that includes glyphs for both Latin characters and

ideographs, is an example that brings together the complexities from both worlds of typog-

raphy. While readers of this book should now be well aware of the issues that surround the

use of ideographs in typography, Latin characters used in Vietnamese, which are called

Quc ng, require extensive use of diacritic marks for base characters and tones. Chinese,

Japanese, and Korean text, when transliterated, requires diacritic marks to indicate vowel

length, tone, or other phonetic attributes. However, these transliteration systems are not

considered the primary orthography for these locales, so their fonts do not require these

additional glyphs. Vietnamese or Vietnamese-enabled fonts, on the contrary, require that

these additional glyphs to be minimally functional.

It is safe to conclude that the ideal environment or basis for a fully functional Vietnamese

font is Unicode, in which all necessary characters are encoded, and thus easily accessible.

Table 7-43 illustrates the lowercase simple vowels, including “y,” along with the required

permutations for Vietnamese Quc ng.

Simple vowels and their Table 7-43. Quốc ngữ permutations—lowercase

Simple vowel Required Quc ng permutations

a à  ã á  ă      â     

e è   é  ê      ...