The Hán-Nôm Coded Character Set and Nom Na Tong Regular Reference Font

With its incorporation as a 501(C)3 nonprofit agency in 1999, the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation sought to create computer tools to access the great heritage of Vietnamese writing in Nôm. Basic work on the Hán-Nôm Coded Character Repertoire, with our Nôm Na Tống Light True Type font, the first of its kind, reached culmination with the publication of Kho Chữ Hán Nôm Mã Hoá, edited by Nguyễn Quang Hồng and Ngô Thanh Nhàn (Hanoi: © 2006 Viện Nghiện cứu Hán Nôm, Việt Nam, and The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, U.S.A.)

Since then, the VNPF continued to develop the Nom Na Tong Light font and work closely with Vietnamese scholars and the Ideographic Research Group to further standardize the encoding of Hán-Nôm characters within Unicode / ISO 10646. Nom Na Tong Light is the reference font for the Unicode / ISO 10646 code charts and has been used in the publication of many scholarly works, including Prof. Nguyễn Quang Hồng’s monumental dictionary, Tự Điển Chữ Nôm Dẫn Giải.

The original development of the Hán-Nôm Coded Character Set and font was supported by the Chino Cienega Foundation, the Neil A. McConnell Foundation, the Fertel Foundation, and by many generous individuals, in particular, Mr. Donald L. Holley. We also thank Father Anthony Trần Văn Kiệm, Ms. Lê Mai Phương, and Dr. Lê Phạm Ngưng Hương for their special contributions to this long endeavor.

After the dissolution of the VNPF in 2019, the VNPF’s font development and character encoding efforts continue to be supported by a group of volunteers. If you are interested in participating in the effort, please contact us at info@nomfoundation.org

The NomNaTong font and sources now reside in a repository on Github, along with documentation describing each release. There are 3 versions of the Font:

1. NomNaTong-Regular.ttf
2. NomNaTong-Regular.otf
3. NomNaTongLight.ttf

Download: Latest version of NomNaTong