Vietnamese Quoted-Readable
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VIetnamese Quoted-Readable, usually abbreviated VIQR, 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:
| 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 hyphen) 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.