Nommoji is a notes app built for Vietnamese classical script. Write, keep and re-read chữ Nôm and chữ Hán without tofu boxes, broken font fallbacks, or characters that disappear when you reopen the file.
Mainstream editors fail on Nôm for three reasons: the rarer characters live in Unicode Extension B and above, thousands more sit in Private Use Area blocks that no system font covers, and no standard keyboard turns Vietnamese syllables into Nôm. Nommoji bundles its own fonts and its own input method, so the text renders and stays yours.
WRITE NÔM WITH A VIETNAMESE KEYBOARD
Turn on Nôm input and type the way you already type — Telex. "nguwowif" becomes "người", and a candidate bar offers the Nôm characters for that syllable. Over 7,500 syllables and 50,000 entries are built into the app. Nothing to download, nothing to sign in to.
SIX CALLIGRAPHIC STYLES
Regular, Kai (楷書), Running (行書), Cursive (草書), Clerical (隸書) and Seal (篆書). Choose the style per document.
PAPER, NOT A BACKGROUND
Five papers drawn from Hán-Nôm practice: plain (素), ruled (行), 界欄 — the ruled frame and column rules of a woodblock page — and the 田字格 and 米字格 practice grids. The ruling is pitched off your own type size, so characters sit on it instead of drifting across it, and the sheet carries a 宣紙 texture rather than a flat colour.
SET IT LIKE A PRINTED PAGE
The proportions a woodblock canvas is cut to: type size, 行間 (the gap between columns), 字間 (the gap between characters), and a 天頭 margin above the text block deeper than the one below it. Pinch to zoom in on a glyph and check a stroke.
CLASSICAL VERTICAL LAYOUT
Write in columns — top to bottom, right to left — the way the texts were originally set, with the Nôm keyboard working the same way it does horizontally. Latin words and numbers stay upright and readable inside the column (縱中橫), and punctuation takes its vertical form. Switch back to horizontal whenever you want.
PLAIN TEXT, ON PURPOSE
Nommoji keeps what you type as plain text — no bold, no headings, no lists. A page of Nôm is set by its script, its paper and its proportions; formatting marks belong to a different kind of document. Your file stays a file.
KEEP AND FIND YOUR WORK
Pin the documents you keep returning to, file the rest into folders, and search every note by title or by body text.
YOUR WORK, ON YOUR DEVICE
Nommoji keeps everything locally. No account, no sign-in, no sync server, no analytics, no tracking. It works with the network switched off — on a plane, or in an archive reading room.
EXPORT WHAT YOU WRITE
Send any document to the iOS share sheet as Markdown or as a .nom file — save it to Files, mail it, or open it in another app. The .nom format is plain JSON, so your text stays readable by other tools for as long as you keep the file.
COMPANION TO NÔM NA VIỆT
Nommoji is where you write. Nôm Na Việt — free on the App Store — is where you look things up: a Hán-Nôm dictionary with readings and meanings, a converter, and a reader for classical texts.
FONTS
Nommoji bundles NomNaTong, BabelStone Han, Plangothic P1 and P2, Han-Nom Khai, MoE Lishu, Chong Xi Small Seal, WHT Hsing Shu and Liu Jian Mao Cao. Our thanks to everyone who made these available.
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