---
title: "Writing Software for Novelists Who Don't Write in English"
description: "How to write and typeset a book in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Greek or Vietnamese, which typeface each script gets, and what still needs building."
source: https://usegalley.com/blog/write-a-novel-in-your-language
---
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# Writing Software for Novelists Who Don't Write in English

September 2, 2026 [Design](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/design)[Publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/publishing)

![A translation glyph over a dark field, with the Galley wordmark](https://usegalley.com/images/blog/write-a-novel-in-your-language.png) TL;DR Most book-writing tools are built for English and give you a Latin serif whatever language you type. Galley picks the typeface from your book's language: Amiri for Arabic, Nastaliq for Urdu, Frank Ruhl Libre for Hebrew, Shippori Mincho for Japanese, and so on across 54 languages. A face that cannot render your script is never in the dropdown. Language support is a work in progress, rolling out in phases: Arabic and Persian first, then Hebrew, then the rest of the non-Latin scripts, with Japanese and Chinese last.

Search for book writing software and every result assumes you write in English.
The templates are English. The examples are English. Most of them will let you
type Arabic or Japanese into the editor, because the browser does that for free,
and then hand you a PDF where your book is set in a serif drawn for the Latin
alphabet and your own script comes out as empty boxes.

This is the list of languages Galley serves, the face each script is set in, and
what happens to it when it gets typeset.

## Why Galley supports more than English

A novelist writing in Bengali is doing the same job as one writing in English.
A tool that mangles the book at the last step has decided who it is for.

Self-publishing is not an Anglophone activity either. Arabic, Hindi, Bengali,
Japanese and Chinese have more readers between them than English. The tools
never caught up, so those writers are in Word, in InDesign, or paying a
typesetter for something software should do.

There is a practical reason too. Galley has a
[side-by-side translation view](https://usegalley.com/docs/series-and-translations), original on the
left, your translation on the right. That is worth nothing if the translation
cannot be printed.

## What the language setting actually does

Every book in Galley carries one language, set on its metadata page. It is not
decoration. It does four jobs:

- **Spellcheck.** Your prose is checked against your own browser’s dictionary,
so any language works if you have the dictionary installed. Galley never
uploads your text to check it.

- **The [EPUB](https://usegalley.com/glossary#epub) tag.** The language is written into the EPUB so a reading device
knows what it is holding. This matters more than it sounds for CJK, and there
is a section on that below.

- **Hyphenation.** 35 of the 54 languages carry hyphenation patterns, used only
when you justify the [print PDF](https://usegalley.com/glossary#print-pdf). Justification is off by default.

- **The typeface shelf.** This is the important one. Your language decides which
book faces you are offered, and a face that cannot render your script never
appears in the dropdown.

That last point is the difference between a tool that tolerates your language
and one that sets it. Picking a beautiful Garamond for a Hindi novel and finding
out at export time is a bad afternoon. It is easier to remove the wrong answers
than to warn about them.

## Why these faces and not the ones you have heard of

Every face in Galley is under the [SIL Open Font License](https://openfontlicense.org/),
and that is not a stylistic preference. It is the only licence that lets the
software do its job.

When Galley makes your print PDF it **embeds the font inside the file**. Same
with the EPUB. That is redistribution, and most of the type the publishing trade
actually sets books in does not permit it without a separate licence, usually
priced per title or per print run. Sabon, Bembo, Minion, Adobe Garamond, Dante,
Morisawa’s Ryumin, Founder’s Songti, SM Myeongjo, Noori Nastaliq. Those are the
faces the industry uses, and every one of them would put a licensing bill
between you and your own book.

So the rule for the shelf is two things at once: **licensed for you to sell the
book, and the face a novel in that language is actually set in.** Where the
classic is not available, Galley ships the closest honest revival or a face in
the same tradition, and each section below says which one and what it descends
from. Where the gap is real, it says that too.

## Write your book in English

English gets the widest shelf: fifteen faces, every one cut for long-form
reading rather than for a screen. Five are marked Recommended. They are the safe
choices for a novel and you will not go wrong with any of them.

Most are revivals of the faces English-language novels have been set in for
centuries. **EB Garamond** is Claude Garamond by way of the Egenolff-Berner
specimen, and Garamond is the most-set face in English trade fiction. **Libre
Baskerville** is Baskerville. **Libre Caslon Text** is Caslon. **Cardo** follows
Bembo. **Crimson Pro** sits in the same oldstyle tradition as Minion. **Source
Serif 4** comes out of Fournier. **Literata** was drawn for Google Play Books
and **Newsreader** and **Spectral** for long-form reading. **Alegreya** was
designed specifically for literature. **Charis SIL** descends from Bitstream
Charter.

**Recommended: EB Garamond, Crimson Pro, Cormorant, Lora, Libre Baskerville.**

There is a fuller page on
[book writing software for a novel in English](https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-english),
covering house style, trim sizes and where an English book gets sold.

![Sample sentence in EB Garamond](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/eb-garamond-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Crimson Pro](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/crimson-pro-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Cormorant Garamond](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/cormorant-garamond-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Lora](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/lora-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Libre Baskerville](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/libre-baskerville-en.png)

**The rest of the shelf: Literata, Source Serif 4, Spectral, Alegreya, Vollkorn,
Cardo, Gentium Book Plus, Newsreader, Libre Caslon Text, Charis SIL.**

![Sample sentence in Literata](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/literata-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Source Serif 4](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/source-serif-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Spectral](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/spectral-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Alegreya](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/alegreya-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Vollkorn](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/vollkorn-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Cardo](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/cardo-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Gentium Book Plus](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/gentium-book-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Newsreader](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/newsreader-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Libre Caslon Text](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/libre-caslon-en.png)

![Sample sentence in Charis SIL](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/charis-sil-en.png)

All fifteen carry a real italic and a real bold, drawn rather than slanted or
stroked on. That is worth checking in any tool: a faked italic is visible on a
printed page even when nobody can say why.

**What you will not find here:** Sabon, Bembo, Minion, Adobe Garamond, Granjon,
Dante, Janson Text, Electra, Palatino. These are the faces a London or New York
production department would reach for, and all of them are proprietary. Setting
your book in Sabon means licensing Sabon. The revivals above are the closest you
can get and still own the file you sell.

One caveat I will make in public: **Cormorant is a display face.** It is
beautiful at a chapter opening and light for a whole novel at body size. It is
on the shelf because people ask for it. Set a sample page before committing to
it.

Ten of them also set Cyrillic, seven set Greek and twelve set Vietnamese, which
is what the next few sections are about.

## Write your book in Arabic

Arabic is cursive. Every letter takes a different shape depending on what sits
beside it, four shapes for most letters, and the text runs right to left. It is
the hardest script in this list to typeset and the one with the strongest
typographic tradition to live up to.

**The faces: Amiri, Noto Naskh Arabic, Scheherazade New.**

![Sample sentence in Amiri](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/amiri-ar.png)

![Sample sentence in Noto Naskh Arabic](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-naskh-arabic-ar.png)

![Sample sentence in Scheherazade New](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/scheherazade-new-ar.png)

Amiri is the literary choice. It is modelled on the type cut for the
[Bulaq Press](https://www.amirifont.org/) in nineteenth-century Cairo, and it is
what an Arabic novel is supposed to look like. Noto Naskh Arabic is the safe
default with the broadest glyph coverage. Scheherazade New, from SIL, reaches
furthest into the languages that borrow the Arabic script, including Sindhi,
Kurdish, Kashmiri and Uyghur.

All three are Naskh, the style Arabic books are set in. None of them has an
italic, and that is correct rather than a gap. Arabic has no italic tradition.
A slanted Naskh is not emphasis, it is a mistake, so Galley does not offer one.

Arabic justification traditionally uses kashida, elongating the connecting
strokes rather than stretching the spaces between words. Galley does not do
kashida. Set your Arabic book [ragged right](https://usegalley.com/glossary#ragged-right), which is also what most contemporary
Arabic publishers do.

**What you will not find here:** DecoType Naskh, Monotype Naskh, Linotype’s
Simplified Arabic, the Boutros families. Arabic is the one script where the gap
barely matters, because Amiri is a revival of a genuine press face rather than a
substitute for one.

## Write your book in Persian (Farsi)

Persian uses the Arabic script with four extra letters, پ چ ژ گ, and its own
digit forms. It is not a dialect of Arabic and it is not typeset identically,
but it rides the same machinery.

**The faces: Markazi Text, Amiri, Noto Naskh Arabic, Scheherazade New.**

![Sample sentence in Markazi Text](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/markazi-text-fa.png)

![Sample sentence in Amiri](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/amiri-fa.png)

![Sample sentence in Noto Naskh Arabic](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-naskh-arabic-fa.png)

![Sample sentence in Scheherazade New](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/scheherazade-new-fa.png)

Markazi Text is the one to reach for first. It was drawn for Persian by a
Persian type designer, where the other three are Arabic faces that happen to
cover Persian as well. There is a fuller page on
[book writing software for a novel in Persian](https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-persian),
covering direction, the half-space, punctuation and publishing.

**What you will not find here:** Nazanin, Lotus, Mitra, Yagut. Nazanin in
particular is the face a Persian reader has seen their whole life, and it is
licensed from Iranian foundries rather than freely. Markazi is the closest
available in the same tradition.

Coverage is the thing to check with any of them. A face cut for Arabic alone
will not carry the four Persian letters, and a book that loses چ is not a book.
All four here carry them, and all four carry the Persian digits, so numbers come
out in the forms a Persian reader expects rather than the Arabic-Indic ones.

## Write your book in Urdu

Urdu is where a lot of software quietly gets it wrong, and I will be
specific about why.

Urdu uses the Arabic script, so the temptation is to hand it an Arabic face and
move on. Urdu readers expect **Nastaliq**, a style where the words cascade
diagonally down and to the left, with letterforms that change size and slope
through a word. Setting an Urdu novel in Naskh does not read as a stylistic
choice. It reads as wrong, roughly the way an English novel set entirely in
Comic Sans reads as wrong.

**The faces: Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Gulzar.**

![Sample sentence in Noto Nastaliq Urdu](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-nastaliq-urdu-ur.png)

![Sample sentence in Gulzar](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/gulzar-ur.png)

Noto Nastaliq Urdu is the reliable one and it ships a bold. Gulzar is the better
Nastaliq by most eyes, and it publishes no bold weight at all, so bold text in a
Gulzar book gets a synthetic stroke rather than a real cut. That trade is yours
to make, which is why both are on the shelf.

Nastaliq is unusually demanding on a layout engine. Line heights have to be
generous or the descending words collide. If you set an Urdu book, give it more
leading than you think it needs.

**What you will not find here:** Noori Nastaliq, and this is the widest gap on
the whole shelf. Noori Nastaliq is what Urdu publishing runs on, it is what sits
inside InPage on every Urdu desk, and it is Monotype’s. There is no OFL
equivalent of it. Noto Nastaliq Urdu and Gulzar are the best free Nastaliq that
exists, and an Urdu typesetter will know the difference.

## Write your book in Hebrew

Hebrew runs right to left and is not cursive, which makes it the technically
simplest of the right-to-left scripts. Letters keep their shape. Ordering is the
whole problem, and ordering is a solved problem in the browser.

**The faces: Frank Ruhl Libre, David Libre.**

![Sample sentence in Frank Ruhl Libre](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/frank-ruhl-libre-he.png)

![Sample sentence in David Libre](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/david-libre-he.png)

Frank Ruhl is the classic Hebrew book serif, cut in 1908 and still what most
Hebrew literary publishing looks like. David Libre is the other classic and
reads slightly warmer.

Neither has an italic. Hebrew emphasis is conventionally done with letterspacing
or with a different weight.

**What you will not find here:** Hadassah, Narkis Block, Narkis Tam. Hadassah is
the other great Hebrew book face and is licensed rather than free. Hebrew is
lucky, though: Frank-Rühl is the standard and a faithful open version of it
exists, which is not true for most scripts on this page.

One quirk worth knowing: a Hebrew novel almost always contains Latin somewhere,
a name, an [ISBN](https://usegalley.com/glossary#isbn), a year. Both faces carry Latin alongside the Hebrew, so those
runs are set in the same face rather than falling back to something else.

## Write your book in Hindi

Devanagari hangs its letters from a horizontal line, the shirorekha, running
along the top of every word. Vowels attach above, below, before and after the
consonant they modify, and consonant clusters form conjuncts that are their own
shapes. It renders beautifully and it punishes a font with thin coverage.

**The faces: Noto Serif Devanagari, Tiro Devanagari Hindi.**

![Sample sentence in Noto Serif Devanagari](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-serif-devanagari-hi.png)

![Sample sentence in Tiro Devanagari Hindi](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/tiro-devanagari-hindi-hi.png)

Noto Serif Devanagari is the broad, careful default. Tiro Devanagari Hindi was
drawn by John Hudson for long-form Hindi text, which is exactly what a novel is.
It replaced Martel, which is a good face and is not a book face.

There is no italic in either, and Devanagari has no italic tradition to draw on.

**What you will not find here:** Shree Lipi, Kruti Dev, Linotype Devanagari,
Monotype Devanagari. Indian trade publishing largely runs on Shree Lipi and on
legacy Kruti Dev files, neither of which is licensable for embedding, and Kruti
Dev is not even Unicode.

A warning that applies to any tool, not only this one: **never let software strip
diacritics from Devanagari**. Removing a matra does not produce an
accent-insensitive version of a word, it produces a different word. If a search
box in any writing app finds मत when you typed माता, it is not being helpful.

## Write your book in Bengali

Bengali shares Devanagari’s structure, the headline and the stacked vowel signs,
with its own letterforms and a much larger set of conjuncts. It is the language
of an enormous literary tradition and it is badly served by writing
software.

**The faces: Noto Serif Bengali, Tiro Bangla.**

![Sample sentence in Noto Serif Bengali](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-serif-bengali-bn.png)

![Sample sentence in Tiro Bangla](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/tiro-bangla-bn.png)

Noto Serif Bengali is the workhorse. Tiro Bangla is the more characterful cut
and, unusually for this list, it does have an italic, though it publishes no
bold.

The same diacritic warning applies. Bengali matras are letters, not decoration.

**What you will not find here:** Shree Bangla and the older Lipi and Sulekha
families that Kolkata and Dhaka publishing grew up on. Tiro Bangla is the
closest thing to a modern book face for Bengali that you are free to sell a
book in.

## Write your book in Thai

Thai has no spaces between words. Sentences are separated by spaces and words
are not, which breaks a surprising amount of software that assumes a space means
a word boundary.

**The faces: Noto Serif Thai, Taviraj.**

![Sample sentence in Noto Serif Thai](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-serif-thai-th.png)

![Sample sentence in Taviraj](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/taviraj-th.png)

Noto Serif Thai is the book face. Taviraj is a Thai serif with a real Latin
companion, drawn for reading at length. It replaced Sarabun, which is a document
sans and was the one face on the shelf that novels are not set in.

Thai stacks tone marks and vowel signs above and below the consonant line, so
line height matters more than in Latin. And because there are no spaces, working
out where a line may break takes a dictionary rather than a rule.

Both faces here are **looped** (มีหัว), which is the form Thai books are set in.
Loopless faces are a modern display style and wrong for a novel.

**What you will not find here:** Angsana New, AngsanaUPC, Browallia, Cordia, and
the DB families. Angsana is what most Thai books are set in and it ships with
Microsoft Office under Microsoft’s licence rather than one that lets you embed
it in a book you sell.

## Write your book in Japanese

Japanese is the most demanding script here, and the most interesting.

**The faces: Shippori Mincho, Noto Serif JP.**

![Sample sentence in Shippori Mincho](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/shippori-mincho-ja.png)

![Sample sentence in Noto Serif JP](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-serif-jp-ja.png)

Mincho is the serif category of Japanese type, the equivalent of choosing
Garamond over Helvetica for a novel. Shippori Mincho was drawn for print books
rather than screens and is the right default. Noto Serif JP is the broader,
more neutral alternative.

Three things about Japanese that most software ignores:

**Emphasis is not italic.** Japanese marks emphasis with *bōten*, small dots set
beside each character. A slanted mincho is not a Japanese design decision, it is
a rendering accident. So in a Japanese book Galley replaces the italic button
with a bōten button, ⌘I applies bōten, and the dots reach the print PDF, the
EPUB and the Word file. Word has carried the mark since 2003, so it survives the
handoff to an editor.

**Vertical writing is normal.** Japanese literary fiction is usually set
*tategaki*: characters run top to bottom, columns run right to left, the book
binds on the right, and the pages turn the other way from a Western book.
Horizontal is normal for technical books and some genre fiction. Both are
correct Japanese and only the author knows which book this is. Galley writes
horizontally today, and vertical is on the [roadmap](https://usegalley.com/roadmap).

**What the horizontal half does now.** Chapter numbers set as 第一章. Line breaks
follow kinsoku shori, so a line never opens on 。、」 or a small kana and a full
stop that would push a line over hangs in the margin. There is a quarter-em
space between Han and a Latin word, which is what a compositor sets. Drop caps
are not offered, because a dropped Han character reads as a fault. The trim list
gains 新書, 四六判, B6, A5 and 菊判 in millimetres. A Japanese book carries a 奥付
on its last page instead of a [copyright page](https://usegalley.com/glossary#copyright-page) at the front.

**One thing to check before you commit to Amazon.** KDP sells Japanese as an
ebook and a paperback but not as a hardcover, Traditional Chinese as an ebook
only, and Simplified Chinese and Korean not at all. Galley says so in the book
rather than letting you find out at upload, and every export still works for
every other route. The full list is in [the publishing docs](https://usegalley.com/docs/publishing#kdp-languages).

**The language tag decides how the characters are drawn.** Japanese, Simplified Chinese and
Traditional Chinese share code points for many characters that are drawn
differently in each. This is Han unification, and it means an EPUB with no
language tag can render your Japanese novel in Chinese letterforms on a reader
that guesses wrong. Galley writes the language into the EPUB, which is the one
line of metadata that stops it.

**What you will not find here:** Ryumin, Iwata Mincho, Hiragino Mincho. Ryumin
is Morisawa’s and is the face a Japanese novel is set in, more or less by
default. Japanese type is licensed by subscription and per use, which is exactly
what an embedded font cannot be. Shippori Mincho was drawn for printed books and
is a genuine book mincho, so the tradition is right even though the specific
face is not the one a Tokyo publisher would use.

The [W3C’s Requirements for Japanese Text Layout](https://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/)
is the reference document if you want to know how deep this goes. It is long for
a reason.

## Write your book in Chinese

Chinese is two shelves, not one, and conflating them is the most common mistake.

**Simplified Chinese: Noto Serif SC. Traditional Chinese: Noto Serif TC.**

![Sample sentence in Noto Serif SC](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-serif-sc-zh.png)

![Sample sentence in Noto Serif TC](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-serif-tc-zh.png)

Simplified and Traditional are read by different people and drawn with different
characters. One language setting cannot pick a face for both, so Galley lists
them separately. Set your book to the one you actually wrote.

Song or Ming style is the Chinese book convention, the equivalent of a serif,
and both Noto Serif faces are in it.

Chinese has no spaces between words, no italic tradition, and its own line-break
prohibition rules about which punctuation may not begin or end a line. Vertical
setting is still current in Taiwan and Hong Kong for literary work and has been
uncommon on the mainland since the 1950s. As with Japanese, Galley sets
horizontally today.

**What you will not find here:** Founder’s Songti and Shusong (方正书宋),
Hanyi, and Arphic’s traditional families. Founder is what mainland book
publishing sets in. A Chinese typeface carries tens of thousands of drawn
characters, which is why they are expensive and why the free ones are nearly all
Google’s.

The [W3C’s Requirements for Chinese Text Layout](https://www.w3.org/TR/clreq/)
covers the typographic detail properly.

## Write your book in Korean

**The faces: Nanum Myeongjo, Noto Serif KR.**

![Sample sentence in Nanum Myeongjo](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/nanum-myeongjo-ko.png)

![Sample sentence in Noto Serif KR](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/noto-serif-kr-ko.png)

Myeongjo is the Korean serif category and Nanum Myeongjo is the standard book
choice. Noto Serif KR is the broader alternative and a much larger file.

Hangul is alphabetic but composes into syllable blocks, so it behaves like a
syllabary on the page. Korean does use spaces between words, which makes line
breaking far easier than Chinese or Japanese. Modern Korean is written
horizontally, left to right. Vertical Korean exists but reads as archaic or
deliberately poetic.

Korean has no italic tradition either.

**What you will not find here:** SM Myeongjo, Sandoll Myeongjo, Yoon Myeongjo.
SM Myeongjo is the Korean publishing standard. Nanum Myeongjo is in the same
category and is used in printed Korean books, so this is one of the
smaller gaps.

## Write your book in Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian or Serbian

Cyrillic needs no new fonts at all, which makes it the quietest win on this
list. Ten of Galley’s fifteen Latin book faces already carry a full Cyrillic
alphabet: Alegreya, Charis SIL, Cormorant, EB Garamond, Gentium Book Plus,
Literata, Lora, Source Serif 4, Spectral and Vollkorn. Three of them:

![Sample sentence in EB Garamond](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/eb-garamond-ru.png)

![Sample sentence in Literata](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/literata-ru.png)

![Sample sentence in Vollkorn](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/vollkorn-ru.png)

The other five do not, and this is exactly the trap the language filter exists
to close. Libre Baskerville is a lovely face and it cannot render a single word
of Russian. Before the shelf was filtered by language, a Russian novelist could
pick it and find out at export.

Cyrillic keeps its italics, so emphasis works normally. There is a fuller page on
[book writing software for a novel in Russian](https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-russian),
including the fact that Amazon does not publish in Russian at all.

**What you will not find here:** Literaturnaya and Akademicheskaya, the two
faces Soviet and Russian book publishing was built on. Both are ParaType’s.

## Write your book in Greek

Seven faces carry a real Greek alphabet: Alegreya, Cardo, EB Garamond, Gentium
Book Plus, Literata, Source Serif 4 and Vollkorn. Cardo in particular was drawn
for classical scholarship and has the polytonic coverage to prove it.

![Sample sentence in Cardo](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/cardo-el.png)

![Sample sentence in EB Garamond](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/eb-garamond-el.png)

![Sample sentence in Gentium Book Plus](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/gentium-book-el.png)

Be careful with any tool that claims Greek support. A lot of Latin fonts carry
a handful of Greek letters because they double as mathematical symbols, alpha,
omega, pi, delta, and carry nothing else. That is enough to pass a lazy check
and nowhere near enough to set a book. Galley tests coverage against a full
alphabet for this reason.

**What you will not find here:** Monotype Greek and the Linotype Greek families.
Greek is better served than most, because the Greek Font Society releases
serious free revivals and Cardo’s polytonic work came out of classical
scholarship rather than a marketing brief.

## Write your book in Vietnamese

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet with stacked diacritics, a tone mark on top
of a vowel that already has a mark. That stacking is where fonts fail. Twelve of
the fifteen Latin faces carry the full Vietnamese set.

![Sample sentence in Lora](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/lora-vi.png)

![Sample sentence in Source Serif 4](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/source-serif-vi.png)

![Sample sentence in Newsreader](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/newsreader-vi.png)

Vietnamese has no hyphenation patterns in Galley, so justify with care or set it
ragged right.

Vietnamese is the one script on this page with no gap worth naming. It sets in
Latin type, and the faces above are the same ones a Vietnamese publisher would
choose, provided they carry the stacked diacritics.

## Translations, editions and localisation

Two words get confused here and the difference matters.

**Localisation** is translating the software. Galley’s own interface is in
English and stays in English. I am one person and a half-translated interface is
worse than an English one.

**Translation** is your book, and that is what Galley is built for. A
translation is a real book in its own right: its own language, its own ISBN, its
own cover, its own blurb, its own typeface shelf chosen by its own language. It
stays linked to the original so your dashboard does not turn into a list of
near-duplicates, and it opens in a
[side-by-side view](https://usegalley.com/docs/series-and-translations#side-by-side) with the
original read-only on the left.

The practical consequence is that translating your English novel into Arabic
does not mean fighting a tool that thinks every book is the English one. The
Arabic edition gets Amiri, gets tagged as Arabic in the EPUB, and gets no
hyphenation, because none of that is right for Arabic.

## Where to go next

- [Book design and typefaces](https://usegalley.com/docs/book-design#typeface) lists every face by
language, with the reasoning.

- [Series and translations](https://usegalley.com/docs/series-and-translations) covers the full
language list and the side-by-side view.

- [The typography rules that make a book look professionally made](https://usegalley.com/blog/book-typography-basics)
is the Latin-script version of this argument.

- [EPUB vs print PDF](https://usegalley.com/blog/epub-vs-print-pdf) explains why the EPUB handles
some of this for free and the PDF never can.

## More on design

- [The Typography Rules That Make a Book Look Professionally Made](https://usegalley.com/blog/book-typography-basics)Widows, orphans, rivers, hyphenation, and the small typesetting conventions readers never notice but always feel, and why they separate a real book from a Word export.

[Every design post](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/design)

[← All posts](https://usegalley.com/blog)

Galley is the tool that does the part this post is about — the finished, printable book.

[Launch Galley](https://app.usegalley.com)