Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet but adds up to five diacritical marks (dấu phụ) to vowels:
Vietnamese is a Latin-based script but is unique in its heavy use of tone marks and diacritics (accents). A standard Latin font usually covers A-Z. A "Viet hoa" font must cover characters like ă, â, đ, ê, ô, ơ, ư, and the five tone marks (acute, grave, hook above, tilde, dot below). cormorant font viet hoa
| Mistake | Consequence | Solution | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | Instead of "Ế", you get "E" + ◌̂ + ◌́ (three separate glyphs) | Turn off "Combining Marks" in your IME settings. Use precomposed Unicode. | | Forgetting the "Ơ" and "Ư" | These horned vowels (Ơ, Ư) are unique to Vietnamese. Some fonts have them, but uppercase versions (Ớ, Ứ) may be missing. | Test the strings: "ƯỚC MƠ" and "ƠN TRỜI" before buying/using the font. | | Mixing Font Weights | Using Cormorant Bold for the base letter but Regular for the diacritic (rare rendering bug). | Rasterize the text layer or use OpenType features. | | Line Height (Leading) | Vietnamese uppercase diacritics extend above the Cap Height. | Increase line-height to 1.4x to 1.6x the font size to avoid clipping. | Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet but adds up
These diacritics are problematic in high-contrast fonts. Cormorant’s thin hairlines cause the hook above to appear as a negligible flick. Furthermore, the tilde in Cormorant (imported from Latin Small Letter N with Tilde) is too narrow and flat for Vietnamese aesthetics, which prefers a more sinusoidal, centered tilde. | Mistake | Consequence | Solution | |