A unicode Siouan, IPA, Cyrillic, Greek, west European font -- FREE.

[cstelfer at ucalgary.ca]

Hi,

   Gentium is good, but Doulos SIL is even better, or at least that's what
people around this department seem to concur.  Doulos SIL is made by
the same people as Gentium, only it's newer and they have improved some
things.  Here is the link to download it for free:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=DoulosSIL_download

Sorry it's so long.

Doulos SIL looks a lot more like Times New Roman, so you can easily write
your whole document in Doulos SIL and it will look more or less "normal".
I believe that Doulos SIL has all of the same characters as Gentium and
more, so finding the appropriate Siouan characters should be easy.  ONe
nice development in Doulos SIL is the combining accents, which
automatically format themselves.  This works well when you want to have an
accented nasal vowel and you use [~] to indicate nasality.  The combining
accent will automatically move above the tilde so that the two symbols do
not interfere with each other.  But you have to make sure you use the
"combining" accents to get this effect.

Doulos SIL is so useful that our phonology prof, Darin Howe, gets all of
his phonology students to download it to write their papers and
assignments.  The only real downside is that Doulos SIL makes the line
spacing slightly larger than it would be with Times New Roman, so there is
more space between lines than usual.

Hope this helps,

Corey.





> If you are looking for a good font that contains all
> the characters necessary to type any Siouan language
> including the characters used by James Dorsey, I'd
> suggest "Gentium" -- It was
> recommended to me at the LSA meeting by several of the
> people promoting
> the use of Unicode fonts as a standard.  You can
> download it free from
> the following website:
> http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium
>
> It also has all the various accented characters used
> across Europe, a very
> complete inventory of IPA symbols plus Cyrillic and
> Greek for all the Balkanists among us, and a huge
> selection of overstriking diacritics for any characters
> that might be wanting.  Using this as a standard would
> circumvent the problem created by the fact that the
> present Siouan sets don't seem to work with the Mac.
> If your computer can handle Unicode, then this font
> will provide just about everything you would possibly
> need.
>
> Bob
>
>