I give workshops for the community on how to write Vietnamese unicode on a computer every once in a while and get asked the following questions all the time, so here they are for everyone:
Question: Why does VPSKeys insert random spaces into my document when I type in Vietnamese unicode characters?
Short answer: Microsoft Word’s “Smart cut and paste” feature interferes with VPSKeys, so simply turn it off in Word 2003 by going to Tools/Options/Edit and uncheck “Smart cut and paste” or in Word 2007 by clicking on Office Icon/Word Options/Advanced and uncheck “Use smart cut and paste“.
Smart cut and paste in Word2003
Smart cut and paste in Word2007Long answer: “Smart cut and paste” is a feature in Word used during cutting and pasting that inserts spaces around the selection that was just pasted into Word. This helps in preventing words “running” into each other. In doing so, Word looks for word boundaries to insert spaces when necessary. Whenever you type in a Vietnamese character with signs, VPSKeys deletes the previous character without the sign and pastes in the character with the sign. Unfortunately, Vietnamese text in the VPS or unicode format don’t translate well into English. Certain characters that are legal Vietnamese characters within a word happen to be word boundaries in English. This interferes with the “Smart cut and paste” algorithm, making Word think that spaces are missing. You can also selectively turn of just that “insert space” functionality of Smart cut and paste, by going to the Settings and uncheck “Adjust sentence and word spacing automatically”.
Question: Why does my lowercase ‘i’ gets capitalized into a big ‘I’ whenever I type Vietnamese words?
Short answer: Microsoft Word’s “AutoCorrect” feature interferes with VPSKeys, so simply turn it off in Word 2003 by going to Tools/AutoCorrect Options or in Word 2007 by clicking on Office icon/Word Options/Proofing/AutoCorrect Options and uncheck “Replace text as you type”.
AutoCorrect options in Word2003 and Word2007Long answer: “AutoCorrect” is a very useful feature in Word that simply replaces common misspellings with the correct counterparts. Word comes preinstalled with a variety of these combinations, one of which is to replace a lonely lowercase i with a capital I, since the pronoun referring to one’s self in the English language is always capitalized (how egocentric). When you type a Vietnamese word that contains an i, the i might be capitalized, because Word thinks that this i stands by itself even though you have Vietnamese characters around it. Again, that’s because certain Vietnamese characters-while legal in Vietnamese-are word boundaries in English (maybe a dash, a period, an exclamation mark, etc...), and Word is tricked to believe that you misspelled .. uh… yourself. Since AutoCorrect is such a useful feature though, I recommend only deleting the i->I combination instead of turning the feature off altogether.
Happy Typing!