From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Fri Jan 31 2003 - 00:00:12 EST
Paul Hastings <paul at tei dot or dot th> wrote:
> besides ms arial would anybody like to recommend a font suitable for
> vietnamese?
<assume platform="Windows">
Plain old Arial actually isn't your best choice, because it displays the
circumflex-plus-grave and circumflex-plus-acute combinations
incorrectly. For Vietnamese they're supposed to be side-by-side, not
one stacked on top of the other. Courier New and Times New Roman have
the same problem.
Fonts on my Windows 2000 system (at work) that support the Vietnamese
precomposed characters *and* display these combinations correctly
include:
- Arial Unicode MS
- Code2000
- Gentium and GentiumAlt
- Microsoft Sans Serif (not "MS Sans Serif")
- Palatino Linotype (not "Palatino")
- Tahoma
- TITUS Cyberbit Basic
- Verdana
- Verdana Ref
Palatino Linotype is interesting: it displays the grave tone mark to the
right of the circumflex (^`), unlike the others (`^), but according to
some Vietnamese the first method is preferable.
On Verdana Ref, the vertical spacing is a bit too tight for comfort for
stacked combinations like circumflex-plus-tilde, but you may be able to
adjust this.
For best typography, you want to make sure your font supports the
Vietnamese precomposed characters in the U+1Exx range. The decomposed
combinations are canonically equivalent, of course, but they may not
display as nicely on currently available rendering engines. Don't
settle for a font that only supports the "Windows Vietnamese" (CP1258)
set. And do *not* let yourself get involved with VNI fonts.
</assume>
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
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