LINGUIST List 6.5

Tue 10 Jan 1995

Sum: Translating IPA fonts between Macs and DOS/ Windows

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Mike Hammond, Translating IPA between Macs and DOS/ Windows
2. Mike Hammond, more on transfering between Macs and Windows

Everybody-

Thanks to everyone who responded to my recent posting about
translating IPA between Macs and DOS/Windows. (A special
thanks to Albert Bickford of SIL for testing out the
translations with me.) The easiest solution that works at
this point seems to be to use the SIL IPA fonts. The three
fonts in question have the same mappings. There are two
glitches here to keep in mind if you're going to do this.

First, I understand that these fonts don't display as
naturally in Windows. (Not being a Windows person, I don't
know if this is a necessary problem or if there are better
displayed fonts out there for Windows. Nor do I know whether
these fonts print well for Windows people.)

Second, the fonts in the two systems have different names.
For Windows, the fonts are: SILDoulosIPA, SILManuscriptIPA,
and SILSophiaIPA. For Macs, the fonts are: SILDoulosIPA-
Regular, SILManuscriptIPA-Regular, SILSophiaIPA-Regular. This
is not insurmountable, however, as one can either i) rename
the fonts accordingly [just rename them in your system file
or fonts folder for Mac people], or ii) go in and edit the
RTF files so that the appropriate names are present before
converting the RTF file.

(I don't know if this different naming is a function of when
I got the fonts I use or a genuine difference in naming
across the two platforms.)

Now the proposal I'd make is that, if these fonts are still
free and available via anonymous ftp, that we should all try
to use them so that linguistics papers can be exchanged and
archived electronically.

Mike H.

Everyone:

With respect to my recent posting about using the SIL IPA fonts to
transfer files back and forth between Macs and DOS/Windows machines, I
had burbled about some issues facing Windows users. Albert Bickford, a
Windows user himself, clarifies below.

Mike H.

"The SIL IPA fonts encode diacritics as separate zero-width characters,
analogous to typewriter dead-keys (except they are typed after the base
character). Although TrueType fonts allow zero-width characters, some
screen drivers for Windows don't handle them properly. E.g., the cursor
may show up on the screen in the wrong place in a line that contains
diacritics, so it's hard to tell what's going to happen when you type.
Or, the diacritics might not show up at all. With other screen drivers,
things work fine. Laser printer drivers seem to work fine with the most
recent drivers, but for some dot matrix printers, the screen driver is
responsible for rendering the TrueType fonts, so any problems in the
screen driver also affect printouts. So, if people have trouble using the
SIL IPA fonts with Windows, they should try to get the most current
version of the driver, and experiment with different drivers that may be
available until they find one that works."