Keying Popular Orthographies in MS Word

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 2 May 2001, Pamela Munro wrote:
> The problem with the tilde of course is that the normal character set
> provides it only on a and o. Grr. So to get this on other vowels, such
> as i and u, you have to have a special font.

Windows ANSI has a similarly restrictive approach with ogonek (nasal
hook).  For some reason they only envisage it with the nasal vowels of
Polish (a and e).  One possible resource here is that MS provides a set of
extended fonts with a lot more combinations of vowels and diacritics.
These are supplements to the standard ones.  Various MS software need
them.  Bookshelf, I think.  Anyway, if you can get your mits on them they
provide Times Roman, etc., compatible characters for quite a lot of new
possibilities.  Try going to the the Windows Update site and downloading
Pan-European character support, maybe.  I don't know if these are adequate
to support Siouanist needs, but they are more extensive.

The hitch with using these is that the extended characters are in a
different font.  So you can use them (only?) in software that lets you
declare font choices on a character by character basis, like Word.  In
particular, this probably won't work in any linguistic database software
or text editors.  It might work in Outlook.

Any fancy keyboard redefinition software would only be able to access
these characters if it could switch fonts:  insert font selection codes as
well as character numbers.

JEK