Vietnamese Quoted-Readable (usually abbreviated VIQR), also known as Vietnet, is a convention for writing

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

using

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

characters encoded in only 7 bits, making possible for Vietnamese to be supported in computing and communication systems at the time. Because the

Vietnamese alphabet The Vietnamese alphabet ( vi, chữ Quốc ngữ, lit=script of the National language) is the modern Latin writing script or writing system for Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally developed by Portuguese m ...

contains a complex system of

diacritical mark A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s, VIQR requires the user to type in a base letter, followed by one or two characters that represent the diacritical marks.

Syntax

VIQR uses the following convention: VIQR uses DD or Dd for the Vietnamese letter ''Đ'', and dd for the Vietnamese letter ''đ''. To type certain

punctuation marks Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...

(namely, the

period Period may refer to: Common uses * Era, a length or span of time * Full stop (or period), a punctuation mark Arts, entertainment, and media * Period (music), a concept in musical composition * Periodic sentence (or rhetorical period), a concept ...

question mark The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. History In the fifth century, Syriac Bible manuscripts used ...

apostrophe The apostrophe ( or ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one ...

, forward slash, opening

parenthesis A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

, or

tilde The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) i ...

) directly after most Vietnamese words, a

backslash The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. History , efforts to identify either the origin of ...

(\) must be typed directly before the punctuation mark, functioning as an

escape character In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character (computing), character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharac ...

, so that it will not be interpreted as a diacritical mark. For example: : : :: ''What is your name ir My name is Hiếu Văn Trần.''

Software support

VIQR is primarily used as a Vietnamese

input method An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...

in software that supports

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

. Similar input methods include

Telex The telex network is a station-to-station switched network of teleprinters similar to a telephone network, using telegraph-grade connecting circuits for two-way text-based messages. Telex was a major method of sending written messages electroni ...

and

VNI VNI Software Company is a developer of various education, entertainment, office, and utility computer software, software packages. They are known for developing an Character encoding, encoding (VNI encoding) and a popular input method (VNI Input) ...

. Input method editors such as

VPSKeys VPSKeys is a freeware input method editor developed and distributed by the Vietnamese Professionals Society (VPS). One of the first input method editors for Vietnamese, it allows users to add accent marks to Vietnamese text on computers running Mi ...

convert VIQR sequences to Unicode

precomposed character A precomposed character (alternatively composite character or decomposable character) is a Unicode entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a diacri ...

s as one types, typically allowing modifier keys to be input after all the base letters of each word. However, in the absence of input method software or Unicode support, VIQR can still be input using a standard keyboard and read as plain ASCII text without suffering from ''

mojibake Mojibake ( ja, 文字化け; , "character transformation") is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, oft ...

''. Unlike the VISCII and VPS code pages, VIQR is rarely used as a character encoding. While VIQR is registered with the

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Inte ...

as a

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message ...

''charset'', MIME-compliant software is not required to support it. Nevertheless, the Mozilla Vietnamese Enabling Project once produced builds of the open source version of

Netscape Communicator Netscape Communicator (or ''Netscape 4'') is a discontinued Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the fourth major release in the Netscape line of browsers. It was first in beta in 1996 and was released in June ...

, as well as its successor, the

Mozilla Application Suite The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite) is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition ...

, that were capable of decoding VIQR-encoded webpages, e-mails, and newsgroup messages. In these unofficial builds, a "VIQR" option appears in the Edit , Character Set menu, alongside the VISCII, TCVN 5712, VPS, and Windows-1258 options that remained available for several years in

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current an ...

and

Thunderbird Thunderbird, thunder bird or thunderbirds may refer to: * Thunderbird (mythology), a legendary creature in certain North American indigenous peoples' history and culture * Ford Thunderbird, a car Birds * Dromornithidae, extinct flightless birds ...

History

By the early 1990s, an ad-hoc system of mnemonics known as Vietnet was in use on the Viet-Net

mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...

and soc.culture.vietnamese

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

group. In 1992, the Vietnamese Standardization Group (Viet-Std, ''Nhóm Nghiên Cứu Tiêu Chuẩn Tiếng Việt'') from the TriChlor Software Group led by Christopher Cuong T. Nguyen, Cuong M. Bui, and Hoc D. Ngo in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

formalized the VIQR convention. It was described the next year in RFC 1456.

Syntax

Software support

History

See also