From: Clytie Siddall Date: 2005-07-17 ================================================================================ I don't think I really need to give you any alterations for Vietnamese: our Chinese-base references are out-of-date, and we really use French-based refs for most things. If I find an exception, I'll mention it. I'd certainly avoid Roman numerals, and alphabetical order, since our alphabet has 72 vowels, and a,b,c,d,e,f,g in English order would be a,ă,â,b,c,d,đ in Vietnamese: Arabian numerical order is best. We appreciate very definite hierarchical structure (reflected in our social base), and can follow lateral references quite extensively, provided the main hierarchy is clear. Our language uses combined diacritics, and a lot of them, being a tonal language, so quotation marks are a bad idea (we use guillemots) and even superscript and subscript need to be carefully spaced. Our upper and lower accents can result in crowded line-spacing, so a slightly larger default font is a good idea, or simply larger line-spacing. Underlining links obscures our lower accents, so css removing this is a good idea. I generally use colours instead of decoration for links. With all our accents, which are crucial to distinguishing the meaning of words, the plainer and less confusing the background is, the better. Our favourite colours are red and gold, so these are good colours to use as background and borders. I tend to use a warm, pale yellow background, which makes it easier to distinguish similar words. Our language requires UTF-8, and any true Unicode font will render it well, although it is a test case both for Unicode support and for Unicode display, so there are plenty of fonts and applications which do not display it properly. Pre-composed Unicode input (UNFC) is best, otherwise the vowel and the accent can become separated in some types of programs (e.g. Carbon, as opposed to Cocoa).