Corpora: I.P.A.

Trond Trosterud trond.trosterud at hum.uit.no
Tue Oct 3 15:00:05 UTC 2000


>     Hi everybody, Could anybody tell me where  can I find the I.P.A.
>fonts? and can I use them with Microsoft Word?  
>                                                            Thanks in
>advance
>                                                                      Leo
>   

Just to do a stunt for the UCS (Universal Character Set
(http://www.unicode.org):

If you have Windows 9x and Office 2000, you already have the IPA fonts
right there. No need to download anything.

Go to Insert > Symbol, and chose a font with "Unicode" in the name (Arial
and Lucida are two candidates), and start scrolling down. After two windows
of characters you are right in the middle of IPA (what you get is actually
this: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf).

The benefit is that whatever you write will be readable in all foreseable
future (whereas the encoding behind the fonts cited so far live their last
Indian Summer at the moment). The bad news is that Microsoft has no easy
way of let you access these fonts (as usually), what is needed now is thus
a keyboard driver file that gives you the UCS IPA symbols when you type.
Technically inclined persons on this list or elsewhere should volunteer.
But the extra labour of writing the text should be more than compensated by
the knowledge that people will actually be able to read it afterwards.

UCS for mac comes with OS X, UCS for Unix is already here, in theory, at
last, cf. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html . I do not know to
what extend all the basic unix tools for corpus work can handle the UCS X11
fonts (but perhaps other people do, in which case I would really like to
know).

Since this is a corpus list, I think it is only fair to give advices so
that the collected material can be read in 2003 also. This goes for
non-8859-1 (Western Eurpoean) languages as well, of course.

Greetings,

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