Vietnamese Quoted-Readable
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
VIetnamese Quoted-Readable, usually abbreviated VIQR and also known as Vietnet, is a convention for writing Vietnamese using ASCII characters. Because the Vietnamese alphabet contains a complex system of diacritical marks, VIQR requires the user to type in a base letter, followed by one or two characters that represent the diacritical marks:
Contents |
[edit] Usage
VIQR uses the following convention:
| Diacritical Marks in VIQR | ||
|---|---|---|
| Diacritical mark | Typed character | Examples |
| trăng (breve) | ( |
a( → ă |
| mũ (circumflex) | ^ |
a^ → â |
| móc (horn) | + or * |
o+ → ơ |
| huyền (grave) | ` |
a` → à |
| sắc (acute) | ' or / |
a' → á |
| hỏi (hook) | ? |
a? → ả |
| ngã (tilde) | ~ |
a~ → ã |
| nặng (dot below) | . |
a. → ạ |
VIQR uses DD for the Vietnamese letter Đ, and dd for the Vietnamese letter đ. To type certain punctuation marks (namely, the period, question mark, apostrophe, forward slash, opening parenthesis, or tilde) directly after most Vietnamese words, a backslash (\) must be typed directly before the punctuation mark, so that it will not be interpreted as a diacritical mark.
Unlike VISCII, VIQR is not a character encoding; rather, it is a way to type out Vietnamese using plain ASCII text. The advantage of VIQR over a character encoding like VISCII is that VIQR does not need specialized software or hardware for input. However, as Unicode is becoming increasingly available on computers worldwide, it is usually desirable to use software that will convert VIQR to Unicode as one types; thus, VIQR would be used only as an input method.
[edit] History
The use of VIQR began during the Vietnam War, when typewriters were the main tool for word processing. Because the U.S. military required a way to represent Vietnamese scripts accurately on official documents, VIQR was invented for the military. Due to its longstanding use, VIQR was a natural choice for computer word processing, prior to the appearance of VNI, VPS, VISCII, and Unicode. It is still widely used for information exchange on computers, but is not desirable for design and layout, due to its cryptic appearance.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- RFC 1456 – Conventions for Encoding the Vietnamese Language (VISCII and VIQR)
- The VIQR Convention
- AnGiang Software
- Free Online VIQR to Unicode Converter
- Help page on inputting Vietnamese text in Vietnamese Wikipedia
