ELL: Unicode Font for the Mac

[Peter Constable]

Randy:

>Thanks very much for yor reply to my question. It was very informative,
>but depressing, as it seems I will not be able to use IPA/Unicode on my
>web sites.  I was hoping that if I used a full Unicode font such as
>Arial, I could have English, Chinese and IPA on the site with only one
>font.

I've not done much with HTML and CSS, so I'm not sure what options exist
as far as controlling what fonts get used. I know that you can create a
page without specifying any font, in which case it is up to the user's
browser to determine what font to use. I know that IE 5.x on Windows will
handle English and Chinese text encoded in Unicode, and it can also handle
IPA, though that might require adjusting some settings (I haven't
experimented with this so I'm not sure -- also, if you have IPA with lots
of diacritics or contour tone letters, I think it will be another six
months or so before IE can deal with stacking diacritics or ligating the
tone letters). I haven't researched what might happen with other browsers
or other platforms.


>A second option is any IPA font that has the same code-points for
>MAC and PC, but there are none that I know of except the new SIL font
>you mentioned (Is that part of the SIL Encore Fonts package?)

It was created from the Encore fonts package, but does not come in the
package (we created it since Encore 3 was completed).


>and I'll
>deal with Chinese in some other way.  Would that work?  I definitely
>don't want to do what most people have done, which is to use graphics
>for IPA. (I now have graphics, but it makes them "dead".)

If you want to mix English, IPA and Chinese in HTML without resorting to
graphics, then the best way to do it would be by encoding all of the text
in Unicode. You could use a custom-encoded font for the IPA, but then
you'll probably have to specify an encoding other than Unicode for the
page, and then you'll have to use numeric character references for all of
the Chinese text. (Either that or you use a bunch of hacked fonts for the
Chinese, but I wouldn't recommend that.)



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable at sil.org>
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