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Fonts are a crucial element for enhancing text presentation. To have a beautiful Vietnamese font without typing errors, you need to use the corresponding character mapping. Below is a list of character mappings for the latest font styles.
1. What is a character mapping?
When dealing extensively with office computers, you'll discover numerous font styles that can be installed on your computer.
And following international standards, most fonts are initially created with the English language, meaning they include letters but lack accents and punctuation as found in our Vietnamese language. To facilitate Vietnamese usage, many fonts have been encoded in the Vietnamese language, supporting popular input methods like TELEX and VNI.
However, different Vietnamese-optimized fonts require various character encodings for accent typing. As seen in the image below, there is a list of Vietnamese accent input encodings that Unikey supports.
If you use an inappropriate encoding for your Vietnamese-optimized font, when typing accented Vietnamese characters, the font may encounter errors or revert to a basic font.
Therefore, it's crucial to use a character encoding that is truly suitable for the font.
2. Character Encodings Corresponding to Fonts
Normally, the displayed names of fonts don't explicitly indicate the encoding used for Vietnamese typing. However, with prolonged use, we can recognize certain features based on naming conventions.
2.1 Unicode Encoding
Unicode encoding is an internationally standardized encoding commonly used in tools or software for Vietnamese text encoding and on websites that support Vietnamese typing.
Usually, Vietnamese-optimized fonts using Unicode encoding won't have any shorthand prefixes. They'll have English names like Arial, Time New Roman, Verdana, or start with the 'UVF' prefix.
2.2 TCVN3 Encoding (ABC)
TCVN3 encoding (Vietnamese Standard 3) is the old standard encoding in Vietnam, widely used in the northern region in the past.
Fonts using TCVN3 encoding often bear the characters '.Vn' or 'VH' at the beginning of their names.
2.3 VNI-Windows Encoding
VNI-Windows encoding was a prevalent encoding used in the southern region in the past.
Fonts utilizing VNI-Windows encoding typically feature names prefixed with 'VNI-'
2.4 Vietware X Encoding
Vietware X character set is widely used in the Central region to type Vietnamese on computers using Vietware software.
The fonts using this Vietware X character set often have names prefixed with the characters 'Vn'.
2.5 Vietware F character set
Similar to Vietware X character set, the fonts using Vietware F character set often have names prefixed with the characters 'SVN'.
2.6 Other Character Sets
And the remaining character sets are often less widely used, making them an alternative when you can't find a suitable Vietnamese font with a known character set. You can experiment with different character sets.
For example, the Comic font set by Hunglan rarely utilizes the BK HCM 2 character set, which is not widely adopted.
3. Determining the Character Set of Fonts
If you find it challenging to identify the character set of a font, you can rely on the list of fonts categorized by character sets below. This list will provide you with detailed information about the character set of each font, covering most commonly used fonts in the market. To search for the character set of a font, follow these steps:
Step 1: Download the latest list of fonts categorized by character sets to your computer and open the file in Excel.
Step 2: Since the Excel file contains nearly 100,000 different fonts, manual search can be challenging. Press Ctrl + F to open Find and Replace.
In the Find window, enter the font name in the Find What (1) field and press Find Next (2) to search for the font in the list.
Step 3: Finally, you only need to find the matching font in the search and check the font's character set in column A.
In this case, the Nhat Ky font that Software Tips is searching for has the Unicode character set.
Download the latest list of fonts categorized by character sets using the link below:
font-list-by-character-set.xls
Above is the guide to finding the corresponding character set for the font. Wishing you luck and success!
