How can I use Vietnamese characters on my Home XP/Word 2002 application,
without changing my entire computer to Vietnamese?
Hopefully it's not too different from XP Pro! (It's not a Word-
specific thing.)
Go to Start | Control Panel | Regional and Language Options |
Languages | Details | Add | Input Languages (scroll to Vietnamese)
If it offers you more than one keyboard, pick the one you're familiar
with, or you could put in all of them.
Click "OK" a jillion times, and near the right corner of your status
bar at the bottom, you'll see a little square with "EN" -- that shows
that you're currently in your English-typing mode. Click on that and
you get a menu listing Vietnamese; choose Vietnamese, and your
keyboard will do unusual things.
To see what your keyboard is doing, get the On-Screen Keyboard from
Start | All Programs | Accessories | Accessibility | On-Screen
Keyboard. (You can put an icon for it in your Start menu and/or on
your status bar and/or on your desktop.)
To get the On-Screen Keyboard to show you what the keys are now doing,
be in the document you want to type in Vietnamese in, switch your
system to VN, click in the document, and hover over the On-Screen
Keyboard, and it changes to Vietnamese. You can then type by clicking
on the keys, but after using it that way a few times, I found it
easier to go to Settings | Typing Mode | Hover to Select (set to 0.5
sec). Eventually I got used to where everything was and could just
type without using the On-Screen Keyboard any more.
I haven't tried typing Vietnamese yet. If the tone marks don't all
show up on the main keyboard (they might or might not), you'll need to
hunt around in MS Online Help to find the instructions containing the
key sequences for them. (They're probably some combination of Ctrl,
Shift, Alt, and the punctuation keys on the regular keyboard.)
It really isn't as complicated as it sounds -- you just need to do
this once for each language you want to use, and then they're all
there until you go back through the Control Panel to make them go
away. (If you want other Southeast Asian languages, such as Thai,
you'll need to have your Windows CD handy, since it doesn't
automatically install that capability.)
***
On the other hand, if you only need to type three letters, you can go
to Insert | Symbol, select a font that you know includes the
Vietnamese alphabet (such as Tahoma), go to that range of characters,
and double-click on the ones you want. Once the letters are in your
document, you can try changing their font to what you're using in your
document, and if you're lucky, that font has Vietnamese in it.
