Telex or TELEX ( vi, Quốc ngữ điện tín, lit=national language telex), is a convention for encoding Vietnamese text in plain

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. Originally used for transmitting Vietnamese text over telex systems, it is one of the most used input method on phones and touchscreens and also computers. Vietnamese Morse code uses the TELEX system. Other systems include VNI and VIQR.

History

The Telex input method is based on a set of rules for transmitting accented Vietnamese text over telex () first used in Vietnam during the 1920s and 1930s. Telex services at the time ran over infrastructure that was designed overseas to handle only a basic

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

, so a message reading "" ("the dam broke") could easily be misinterpreted as "" ("the wife is giving birth"). , a prominent journalist and translator, is credited with devising the original set of rules for telex systems. In later decades, common computer systems came with largely the same limitations as the telex infrastructure, namely inadequate support for the large number of characters in Vietnamese. Mnemonics like Telex and

Vietnamese Quoted-Readable Vietnamese Quoted-Readable (usually abbreviated VIQR), also known as Vietnet, is a convention for writing Vietnamese using ASCII characters encoded in only 7 bits, making possible for Vietnamese to be supported in computing and communication syste ...

(VIQR) were adapted for these systems. As a variable-width character encoding, Telex represents a single Vietnamese character as one, two, or three ASCII characters. By contrast, a byte-oriented

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some c ...

like VISCII takes up only one byte per Vietnamese character but requires specialized software or hardware for input. In the 1980s and 1990s, Telex was adopted as a way to type Vietnamese on standard English keyboards. Specialized software converted Telex keystrokes to either precomposed or decomposed Unicode text as the user typed. VietStar was the first such software package to support this entry mode. The Bked editor by extended Telex with commands such as z,

 .html" ;"title="/code> for "ư", and ">/code> for "ư", and /code> for "ơ". It was further popularized with the input method editors  VietKey,  Vietres, and 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 ...
. In 1993, the use of Telex as an input method was standardized in Vietnam as part of  TCVN 5712.

In the 2000s, 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,  ...
 largely supplanted language-specific encodings on modern computer systems and the Internet 










The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected  computer networks that uses the  Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
, limiting Telex's use in text storage and transmission. However, it remains the default input method for many input method editors, with VIQR and  VNI offered as alternatives. It also continues to supplement international Morse Code 







Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to  encode  text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after  Samuel Morse, one  ...
 in Vietnamese telegraph transmissions.

Starting with Windows 10 










Windows 10 is a major release of  Microsoft's  Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was  released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...
 version 1903, TELEX, along with the  VNI input method, are now natively supported.

 Rules

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



To write the pair of keys as two distinct characters, the second character has to be repeated. For example, the Vietnamese word  must be entered as cari xooong rather than cari xoong (*).



If more than one tone marking key is pressed, the last one will be used. For example, typing asz will return "a". (Thus ''z'' can also be used to delete diacritics when using an input method editor.) To write a tone marking key as a normal character, one has to press it twice: her becomes , while herr becomes . 


 See also

* VNI
* VIQR
* VISCII

 External links

* Guide to inputting Vietnamese text at the Vietnamese Wikipedia
Learn To Type Vietnamese
at YourVietnamese

 References

{{reflist

 Vietnamese character input