Keying Popular Orthographies in MS Word

[Koontz John E]

I've been giving some thought to keying popular orthographies, by which I
really mean things like the current OP popular systems, which rely on
raised n and h to indicate nasality and aspiration, plus various in-line
digraphs to represent other things like gh or th (dh).

The problem with raised n and h is that they are not really part of the
Windows ANSI fonts, so they can only be achived in word processors, by
using the superscript font modification.  You can't use them in regular
Windows text files or email, etc.  But if you do restrict yourself to such
contexts, e.g., MS Word for Office 2000, how can you easily key them in?

One scheme that can be tried in Word is the autocorrection facility.
This is intended to handle cases like replacing teh with the.  If you type
like me then when you user Word you hear a constant series of little blips
as this sort of correction occurs.  Half the time, of course, it's busily
correcting your OP into English, which is rather a nuisance.

You can also use this facility to insert boilerplate text into your
document, like legal disclaimers.  It occurred to me that I could set this
up to replace aN with a<raised n>, since you can include "formatted text"
in your replacement.  To do this, you type the combination you want, like
a<raised n>, highlight it, and then click tools > autocorrection >
autocorrection and add aN to the list of things to replace.  The details
here vary a bit with the character combinations, but you end up with a
correction rule that replaces aN with a<raised n>.

There are two problems with this bright idea.  One is that it seems the
replacements are done only on words, not sub-words, so you have to type a
space and then backspace to invoke the substitution.  Also, It appears
that thanks to some really clever MS programming, not only is iN replaced
with i<raised n>, but also In at the start of a sentence.  Probably also
in in the middle of a sentence, though I haven't tested that far yet.  I
was trying to do this and then use it immediately.

Anyone have any (better, more workable) bright ideas?  It is a major pain
to insert the superscripting with the usual menu-based operations, as you
have to turn it off afterwards, too.  Even if you didn't have to, you'd
still prefer to avoid the series of clicks involved.

My other solution is to create new fonts with raised n and h included, and
define aN as a<raised n> in the associated keyboard definition.  This
would work in any application that allows use of arbitrary Windows fonts,
but having to use a non-standard font is a problem in itself.

JEK