RFC 1456 (rfc1456) - Page 1 of 7

Conventions for Encoding the Vietnamese Language VISCII: VIetnamese Standard Code for Information Interchange VIQR: VIetnamese Quoted-Readable Specification

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Network Working Group          Vietnamese Standardization Working Group
Request for Comments: 1456                                     May 1993


            Conventions for Encoding the Vietnamese Language
      VISCII: VIetnamese Standard Code for Information Interchange
             VIQR: VIetnamese Quoted-Readable Specification
                              Revision 1.1

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard.  Distribution of this memo is
   unlimited.

Abstract

   This document provides information to the Internet community on the
   currently used conventions for encoding Vietnamese characters into
   7-bit US ASCII and in an 8-bit form.  These conventions are widely
   used by the overseas Vietnamese who are on the Internet and are
   active in USENET.  This document only provides information and
   specifies no level of standard.

1. Introduction

   In this paper we describe two conventions for representing Vietnamese
   characters.  VISCII (pronounced "visky") is an 8-bit character
   encoding that is similar to that used with ISO-8859.  VIQR
   (pronounced "vicker") is a mnemonic encoding of Vietnamese characters
   into US ASCII for use on 7-bit systems.  There is substantial
   existing online freely distributable software that implements these
   conventions for UNIX and personal computers.  These encodings enable
   Vietnamese-language users to take full advantage of powerful tools
   already developed for the English-speaking world, eliminating
   unnecessary reinvention.  This paper describes these conventions in
   part so that MIME-compliant software might also support the
   Vietnamese language.

   NOTE: The accented Vietnamese letters are herein represented by their
   VIQR equivalents, offset by enclosing angle brackets.  For example,
   the single letter "a acute" is written as , where the apostrophe
   is the mnemonic symbol for the acute.

2. LINGUISTIC OVERVIEW

   As a romanized language, Vietnamese appears to lend itself readily to
   integration into existing English-based systems.  To cite a simple



Vietnamese Standardization Working Group
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