A word about Unicode and the IPA
To view phonetic transcriptions on any of my current pages, particularly any pages from
January 2004 onwards, you will need to have installed on your system a font supported by my
style sheet, or a personal style sheet that can override my values.
Current fonts that I support (in order of preference, in that the style sheet will look for
them in order until it finds one):
- Gentium,
an IPA-enabled Unicode-compliant font by Victor Gaultney
- SILDoulosUnicodeIPA,
the Unicode-compliant version of 'SILDoulos IPA93' (no more leading zeroes!>
- And as soon as SIL gets its executables back on line, I'll add the
other SIL Encore fonts (although I don't recommend Charis for on-screen use)
Good fonts
I am willing to add any font to my style sheet subject to the following conditions:
- It must be IPA-enabled, with correct symbols and diacritics,
and acceptable (to me--I'm not too picky with web stuff, but they have to come close)
spacing/kerning/overstriking characteristics.
- It must be Unicode-compliant, with every IPA symbol, diacritic, etc.
in the appropriate 'place' in the font table.
- It must be available freeware.
If you know of a font that meets these three conditions and should be included in the list
please e-mail the details to me and I'd be happy
to include it.
Not so good fonts
There are a number of fonts that are available and in fairly wide use that I (at
the moment) don't list among my supported fonts. I list those here, along with
the reasons why I don't support them.
- Lucida Sans Unicode
- I think it's amazingly unattractive, but that's not why I don't use it. It turns out to
have some serious errors in the shape of several important diacritics.
- MS Mincho
- Available free with some systems, but not freely available. At least I haven't been
able to find it for freeware download.
- Arial Unicode
- Ditto--I can't find it freeware.
And so on
I'll try to keep this page up-to-date as I hear about and test new fonts. Check the
date-stamp at the bottom of the page (if you have javascript enabled) for the date of the
most recent update.
For those of you with personal style sheets, you can override my settings if you like.
For IPA stuff, I use the 'span' with the attribute 'ipau'.
Happy IPAing!