Book writing software for writing a novel in Vietnamese

Why Galley is the right book writing software for a novel in Vietnamese

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, which is exactly why tools get away with failing it.

The problem is stacking. A Vietnamese vowel can carry a diacritic of its own, like ơ or ê, and then a tone mark on top of that, giving ế, ộ, ữ. Two marks, one letter, and the font has to draw the combination rather than piling one glyph on another. A face that carries every character in Latin Extended and stops there will render Vietnamese as a stack of collisions, or drop the tone entirely, and in print you cannot tell what happened until you look at a proof.

Twelve of the fifteen book faces carry the full Vietnamese set. The other three are hidden on a Vietnamese book, so you cannot pick one by accident and find out at export.

Two things Galley does not do, said plainly: there is no hyphenation for Vietnamese, so justify with care or set the book ragged right, and Amazon does not list Vietnamese in any format, so the print PDF and the EPUB are the whole product.

Everything else is the same app: a true book page at your trim, the story bible beside the manuscript, a print-ready PDF and a valid EPUB.

How Vietnamese gets typeset

Stacked diacritics are drawn, not piled. That is a property of the face, and the language filter is what keeps you on faces that have it.

Leading matters more than in English. Two marks above a letter need room, and a Vietnamese page set at English leading looks cramped. The typeface page has the per-face leading Galley uses.

There is no hyphenation. Justification is off by default and ragged right never needs it, which is the right default here.

Sorting is Vietnamese, so a cast list comes out in the right order rather than folding the tones away.

Italics work, and the shelf carries a real italic throughout.

The typefaces you get for Vietnamese

Twelve faces carry the full Vietnamese set, all under the SIL Open Font License.

Lora handles the stacking cleanly and reads warm at body size.

Source Serif 4 sets an even page and has careful diacritic placement.

Newsreader was drawn for long-form reading and holds up small.

The rest: EB Garamond, Crimson Pro, Cormorant, Literata, Spectral, Alegreya, Vollkorn, Gentium Book Plus and Charis SIL.

Vietnamese is the one script on this shelf 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 stacking. The typeface documentation lists every face by language.

Exports for a Vietnamese novel

• Print-ready PDF at your trim, mirrored margins, real gutter, font embedded.
• EPUB 3 with your cover, tagged vi.
• Store-ready EPUBs for Kobo and Apple Books.
• Word and Markdown for a biên tập viên or an archive.
• Manuscript format, double-spaced.
• A proofreading PDF two pages to a sheet, and a large print PDF.
• A watermarked copy per beta reader.

The Amazon-shaped tools switch off on a Vietnamese book and say why.

Vietnamese punctuation

Vietnamese sets speech with a dash at the head of the line in most fiction, and with the curly pair when quoting inside a paragraph. Both are characters you type.

The dialogue punctuation rules and dashes, hyphens and ellipses sheets cover the general cases.

How long a Vietnamese novel is

Vietnamese publishers quote length in words and printed pages. Vietnamese is monosyllabic in writing, so word counts run high against English for the same story, and the page count projection is the more useful number.

The word count to page count converter helps here.

Trim sizes for a Vietnamese book

Six standards, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to Royal at 6.14×9.21. Vietnamese trade fiction is commonly issued around 13×20.5cm or 14.5×20.5cm, which land near the Digest at 5.5×8.5 inches. The spine width calculator and the trim size comparison would be helpful here.

Metadata and the copyright page

The copyright page writes itself from the metadata you filled in. A Vietnamese ISBN is issued through a licensed publisher rather than directly to an author, which shapes how a domestic edition happens.

Translating into or out of Vietnamese

A translation in Galley is its own book: its own language, its own typeface shelf, its own ISBN, its own cover, still linked to the original, with the editor split so the original sits read-only beside what you write.

There are pages on writing a novel in Thai, writing a novel in Indonesian, writing a novel in Malay and writing a novel in Korean.

No machine touches the prose. Galley has no AI anywhere near your writing.

Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Vietnamese

Self-publishing. Amazon is closed to Vietnamese, and domestic publishing in Vietnam runs through licensed publishers, so a diaspora edition through IngramSpark or a direct print run is the common route. The same print PDF works for both.

Traditional publishing. The submission package assembles the synopsis, the bio and the opening chapters, which is what a publisher inside or outside Vietnam will want to see.

The same book exports both. The longer arguments are in Galley for self-publishing and Galley for traditional publishing.

Where to go next

• Writing software for novelists who don’t write in English covers every script Galley sets.
• Book design and typefaces lists every face by language.
• Series and translations covers the full language list.
• Book typography basics is the set of rules that makes a page look made.