seeking advice

[ERobert52 at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 19/05/03 18:30:02 GMT Daylight Time, cecil at CECILWARD.COM
writes:

> Johanna is right about the practical problems of making use of IPA and
> Unicode, but I suggest that we should be finding ways of making them more
> usable, rather than just accepting the inadequacies of old technologies.
> After all, outside of academia, Microsoft Windows NT and its successors
> have been completely Unicode-based for ten years (down to the currently
> shipping Windows Xp product), so the excuses for not using these
> technologies are already getting more slight.
>
>

In most circumstances (including printing books, which was the original
question) the use of IPA is perfectly straightforward and based on a
universally accepted standard. If this applies, there is no reason to deviate
from that norm or to perpetuate minority deviations from it.

But it doesn't work for everything (e.g. email messages) and I don't expect
technology to provide a universally portable or backward compatible solution
to this anytime soon. There are still 3 incompatible systems for encoding
Cyrillic, so providing support to serve the relatively tiny community that
wants to use IPA is not going to be at the top of anybody's list of
priorities other than ours. But in circumstances where IPA won't work, we can
use SAMPA. This is a system with an agreed systematic correspondence with
most IPA symbols (or all of them, if we include John Wells' suggested
extensions), typable on any keyboard that supports the Latin alphabet, and
universally portable, even to ancient legacy equipment, as it uses only the
7-bit ASCII character set.

If you can't use one, you can use the other.

Ed Robertson
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