Hán Nôm fonts

Microsoft Project 2000 has a full Unicode font called "Arial Unicode MS," which contains a large number of Hán Nôm characters whose code values are under 64K (Extension A).  This font includes approximately 40,000 alphabetical characters, ideographic characters (e.g., Chinese (Hán), Nôm, Japanese, Korean), and symbols defined in the Unicode 2.1 standard. The font is included with all versions of Microsoft Office 2000 Service Release 1 (SR-1), Microsoft Office XP, and Microsoft Publisher 2002.

 

Prior to July 2002, this font used to be downloadable from Microsoft at

http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/aruniupd.aspx.  

Now you can download at

 

The total download size is 13,687 Kb (compressed file), which expands to 24,172,892 bytes uncompressed. For more info about this font, see

http://www.microsoft.com/office/project/prk/2000/Seven/85t2_3.htm.

 

A quick check to see if your system has a full Unicode font is scanning all *.TTF files in the <WINDOWS>\Fonts directory.  A Unicode font that contains Chinese characters is usually very large, in the order of tens of Megabytes.  Most of the True Type font files (with .TTF extension) are typically 1 MB or less, hence contain no Hán Nôm characters.

 

For your information there are several web sites that offer free Unicode fonts for download:

Each Han Nom zip package contains two fonts: "HAN NOM A" for characters under 64K and "HAN NOM B" for surrogate characters in Extension B.  Always try the high resolution version HannomH.zip first.  If the installation fails because your Windows does not recognize the high resolution font, you then try the low resolution version Hannom.zip.  You should not install two packages HannomH.zip and Hannom.zip because whatever installed later will replace the first.  Click here for more info.

 

To display Unicode characters whose code values are greater than 64K (surrogate pairs) the user has to set up their Windows system and install additional fonts that support them.   Instructions are available on the net:

 

 

WinVNKey offers an interface to help users set up surrogate fonts.  For detail see Preferences --> Surrogate Fonts.

 

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