How To Download And Set Up Han Nom Fonts

Han Nom characters fall into two categories: single Unicode values (4 hex digits such as U+xyzt) and double or surrogate Unicode values (5 hex digits such as U+2xyzt and U+Fxyzt). If your computer system does not have appropriate Han Nom fonts, each Han Nom character will appear as an empty square if it is single Unicode value and as two empty squares if double Unicode value. In principle there are potentially 65,535 characters of the form U+xyzt, another 65,535 characters of the form U+2xyzt, and another 65,535 characters of the form U+Fxyzt. At the present time no single font can cover all these 196,605 (=3*65,535) characters. Instead, existing fonts are known to cover a subset of these characters. For example,

Font "HAN NOM A" covers:
- Radicals Supplements [U+2F00 to U+2FD5 (214 glyphs)]
- CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A [U+3400 to U+4DB5 (6572 glyphs)]
- CJK Unified Ideographs [U+4E00 to U+9FA5 (20,832 glyphs)]
- Private Han Nom Ideographs in Plane 0 [U+Exyz]
- Private Han Nom Ideographs in Plane F [U+Fxyzt]
Font "HAN NOM B" covers all characters U+2xyzt in Plane 2:
- CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B [U+20000 ? U+2A6D6 (42,702 glyphs)]
- Fillers used by font designers on purpose [U+2A6D0 ...]
Font "Arial Unicode MS" covers:
- Almost all Latin-based characters
- CJK Unified Ideographs [U+4E00 to U+9FA5 (20,832 glyphs)]

A. Download HAN NOM A

Download and install HAN NOM A font (11 MB exe file) from the archive of WinVNKey

B. Download HAN NOM B

Download and install HAN NOM B font (19 MB exe file) from the archive of WinVNKey

C. Download Arial Unicode MS

Download and install Arial Unicode MS font (13 MB exe file) from a website. This is a Microsoft Unicode font usually available in MS Office 2000 and later. If the file is no longer available, you can search for download aruniupd.exe on google.com and may be able to find the file is available at some site. <
Note
Normally reboot is not required after installation is completed. Your can use these fonts immediately. However, you should verify that the fonts are working properly by clicking on the menu "Fonts and Colors". This will display a dialog with 4 Nom characters. If for some reason some of them do not appear, you should reboot your system.

D. How to set up fonts for Han Nom surrogate characters?

When you type a single Han or Nom character and see two empty squares appear, you should know that your Windows setup and/or your current font is not capable of handling double Unicode characters. Please follows these steps exactly in the order shown below:

Download and install SURREG.EXE (1.3 MB) from Microsoft website. This software allows Windows to process double Unicode characters. It is normally included in the Chinese edition of Office XP.
Run WinVNKey to set up Windows registry as follows: click on the Run button ==> Preferences ==> Surrogate Fonts ==> Click on the “Default” button.
Restart your Windows machine

E. Notes on HAN NOM A and B fonts

These two public domain fonts were designed by a group of Vietnamese scholars (e.g. Quoc-Bao Do, baodo@t-online.de) and volunteers in Vietnam and overseas in the course of over three years. They are available in high and low resolution versions and were originally released in 2005 as

HanNom.zip (both Han Nom A and B fonts in low resolution) and
HanNomH.zip (both Han Nom A and B fonts in low high resolution).

These fonts can be found at the font archive of VietUnicode website. You should always try the high resolution first for best display. If the display does not come out well, then try the low resolution version.

With permission from Quoc-Bao Do, these fonts were repackaged separately by Hoc D. Ngo as exe files in September 2005 to support automatic installation. These exe files are now available for download from the archive of WinVNKey.

Updated October 25, 2005 by Hoc D. Ngo (hoc96@yahoo.com)
Updated May 3, 2006 by Hoc D. Ngo (hoc96@yahoo.com)