IPA fonts
Tony St Quintin
Well... I've had my first thorough look...
I've a sneaking suspicion that the same thought ran through my mind as ran
(many times) through the mind of Steve Seibert - "If only we had not
started from THERE!"
What you get is 4 "new" fonts two faces, each at 8,9,10,11,12 point - a
total of 48 new font files
The A series and I series duplicate SOME diacritics already available.
Both L series (L4, L8) contain MUCH more duplication...
L8 is identical to N8 - with the exception of 16 characters, all of which
appear in N4... L4 looks VERY much like I8 except that "small caps" have
been added, and chrs 5C(h)- 60(h) "have now been made alive" [61(h) is
different - dead hacheck in I8 - normal lc "a" in L4]
64 characters in each font are left "undefined" - neither necessary nor
desirable (this applies to existing Lingua fonts)...
Had the whole thing been approached from the PostScript angle in the first
place...
And if wishes were horses...
This is a comment on the technicalities of the IPA fonts... I'd be VERY
grateful to hear a REAL user's point of view (I think one or two of the
chrs look a bit "iffey") - my limited intercourse with such suggests that
MONOSPACED IPA would be more desireable?
At least I can procede knowing where the parts fit! - SCALABLE soon;
PostScript shortly after....
TSQ
Geoffrey S. Nathan
Notabene <NOTA...@VM.TAU.AC.IL>
** Reply to note from Tony St Quintin <t...@NB-UK.WIN-UK.NET> 02/15/96
03:18am +0200
> This is a comment on the technicalities of the IPA fonts... I'd be VERY
> grateful to hear a REAL user's point of view (I think one or two of the
> chrs look a bit "iffey") - my limited intercourse with such suggests that
> MONOSPACED IPA would be more desireable?
I have now used the fonts for about a month (although only printed a few times,
since I have to carry the printer down the hall to my computer to print--@#$!!
network!) and I've also spoken to NB technical support about things.
There are lots of problems with the IPA font, the primary one being that they
chose an enormous number of weird symbols that are virtually never used (and
don't appear in any phonetics text, let alone in the official IPA handbook).
Many
of them take up space that could be used by symbols that are on different font
pages. For example, schwa and eng show up as encoded e[<-1] and n[<-1] if
you are using any of the other symbols (like gamma, chi, theta, r-colored
schwa...). And for the life of me I can't find the IPA stress mark (small
vertical stroke above the line). I can use accent marks, but for some purposes
I
like to be quite officially IPA. Where they got their idea of what constitute
fonts I don't know, but they certainly didn't check with the IPA.
This wouldn't be such a problem if I had the right ATI card, but I have one of
the more recent Mach 64 types, so only a limited number of symbols can appear
on the screen at a time.
There are free (and quite good) Windows/OS/2 fonts available from the Summer
Institute of Linguistics, and the IPA itself sells a modified version thereof
that
are really nice, but I still prefer to write in Notabene if I have the choice.
So I
guess I'll keep wrestling.
Geoff
Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517
Home phone: 618 549-0106
Don Livingston
In article <9...@nb-uk.win-uk.net>, Tony St Quintin wrote:
>This is a comment on the technicalities of the IPA fonts... I'd be VERY
>grateful to hear a REAL user's point of view (I think one or two of the
>chrs look a bit "iffey") - my limited intercourse with such suggests that
>MONOSPACED IPA would be more desireable?
As a budding linguist I must confirm that MONOSPACED IPA seems much more
sensible because, in my writing at least, immediately under the IPA
representation a grammatically marked word-for-word parsing needs to
appear. The clearest way to show what means what in these contexts is to
line the words up, which means using monospaced fonts unless you want to
waste time writing individual tab settings for each set of examples. DL.