From: Clytie Siddall <clytie@riverland.net.au>
Date: 2005-07-17
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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our Chinese-base references are out-of-date, and we really use French-based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).
