Unicode compliant Việt ngữ

Comparing Unicode fonts for Vietnamese


Font samples


Click on each font-name link to see font samples of several Unicode fonts, shown in the Font Book application from Mac OSX (it makes it really easy to manage your fonts).

Displaying Vietnamese

When displaying Vietnamese, clear and distinct display of vowels and diacritics is essential. To this end, an appropriate font for Vietnamese needs to consider the position of diacritics, and how readers will distinguish them from each other, and from the vowels, when reading prose.

Criteria for displaying Vietnamese


Comparing specific combined diacritics

The two images below compare specific vowels with combined diacritics, in the three fonts, Lucida Grande, Vu Phu Tho and Verajja, described above. This side-by-side comparison at large font-point-size is particularly useful for analyzing the shape and position of diacritics.

Comparing single characters with combined diacritics in the three fonts: table. Also comparing single characters with combined diacritics, in the three fonts: table

Sample prose

The three images below show you sample prose in each of these fonts, Lucida Grande, Vu Phu Tho, Verajja, DejaVu and Freefont. I think you can see why I use Lucida Grande: the font reads very well in our language.

The text is displayed by the Pages, the Mac OSX Unicode publishing program.

Sample prose in Lucida Grande, shown in Pages, the Mac OSX publishing program. Sample prose in Vu Phu Tho, shown in Pages, the Mac OSX publishing program. Sample prose in Verajja, shown in Pages, the Mac OSX publishing program. Sample prose in DejaVu 2.4 Sans, shown in Pages, the Mac OSX publishing program. Sample prose in FreeFont Sans, shown in Pages, the Mac OSX publishing program. This page is very much a quick-edit, put together to save me writing very similar emails, with lots of screenshots, to different people. It in no way purports to cover the entire issue of displaying accented Unicode fonts. Searching Google for "fonts Unicode diacritics" will give you plenty of information on that. :)




Trở về trang Dự án Việt hoá


created in BBEdit made with a Mac