Telex (IME)

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Telex is a convention for writing Vietnamese using ASCII characters commonly found on computer keyboard layouts. Because the Vietnamese alphabet uses a complex system of diacritical marks, Telex requires the user to type in a base letter, followed by one or two characters that represent the diacritical marks:

Non-tonal diacritics
Character	Keys pressed	Sample input	Sample output
ă	aw	trawng	trăng
â	aa	caan	cân
đ	dd	ddaau	đâu
ê	ee	ddeem	đêm
ô	oo	nhoo	nhô
ơ	ow	mow	mơ
ư	uw	tuw	tư

To write the pair of keys as two distinct characters, the second character has to be repeated. For example, "beeer" becomes "beer".

Tone markings
Tone	Keys added to syllable	Sample input	Sample output
Ngang (level)	z or nothing	ngang	ngang
Huyền (falling)	f	huyeenf	huyền
Sắc (rising)	s	sawcs	sắc
Hỏi (dipping-rising)	r	hoir	hỏi
Ngã (rising glottalized)	x	ngax	ngã
Nặng (falling glottalized)	j	nawngj	nặng

If more than one tone marking key is pressed, the last one will be used. For example, typing "asz" will return "a". To write a tone marking key as a normal character, one has to press it twice: "herr" becomes "her".

Unlike VISCII, Telex is not a character encoding; rather, it is a way to type out Vietnamese using plain ASCII text. The advantage of Telex over a character encoding like VISCII is that Telex does not need specialized software or hardware for input. However, as Unicode is becoming increasingly available on computers worldwide, it is usually desirable to use software that will convert Telex to Unicode as one types; thus, Telex would be used only as an input method.