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IPA Transcription with SIL Fonts

SIL Linguistics Department and NRSI staff, 2007-05-30; 692764 reads

    Introduction
    Font Home Pages
        Unicode-encoded Fonts
        Legacy Fonts
    Other IPA Resources
        IPA Unicode codepoints
        IPA Unicode Keyboards
        IPA Character Picker Utility
        Conversion to Unicode
            SIL IPA93
            SIL IPA (1990)
            Amer Phon SILDoulos font
            IPA-SAM phonetic fonts
        Pitch Contours and Tone in Unicode
    Related Links
    Page History

Introduction

SIL International has produced several font sets over the years that allow for the transcription of linguistic data using the International Phonetic Alphabet. These fonts are:

Unicode-encoded fonts
Legacy fonts
- SIL IPA93 2.0
- SIL IPA 1.2

In general, SIL recommends the use of the Unicode-encoded fonts. The older, “legacy” fonts were designed to work with text in a custom 8-bit encoding, not a recognized character encoding standard, and required changing fonts when switching between normal text and IPA transcription. With Unicode-encoded fonts, the user can produce both normal text and IPA transcription with a single font. In addition, Unicode provides cross-platform compatibility. There were built-in incompatibilities between Windows and Mac versions of the legacy fonts, whereas Unicode has been adopted as a standard for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Using Unicode fonts:

Facilitates sharing your data files and archiving your data for future generations.
Allows compatibility with updated computer Operating Systems and SIL software.

Having said that, there are certain special cases that may warrant the use of the legacy fonts:

You are using a legacy application which does not support the use of Unicode or does not support smart-font capabilities for proper placement of diacritics.
You want to produce a near-publication quality document with Doulos, but need the bold, italic, and bold-italic typefaces.
You want to produce a near-publication quality document with Sophia or Manuscript.
Many Universities and Journals continue to require the use of SIL IPA93 fonts. Until that policy is changed you may need to use the SIL IPA93 fonts.

Below, we provide a brief discussion of the issues related to the use of each of the above-mentioned fonts. The best option for publication-quality typesetting is Charis SIL.

Font Home Pages

Unicode-encoded Fonts

Charis SIL Home Page — Charis SIL is a Unicode-encoded serif font. Besides having a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, it also contains the entire inventory of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The latest version also contains the newly-adopted symbol for the labiodental flap. It includes the characters in the SIL Private Use Area. It has built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics are properly placed. It contains all four typefaces (regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic). This is the font that SIL recommends using for publication-quality typesetting. SIL plans to continue developing Charis SIL in the future.

Doulos SIL Home Page — Doulos SIL is a Unicode-encoded serif font similar to Times New Roman. Besides having a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, it also contains the entire inventory of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The latest version also contains the newly-adopted symbol for the labiodental flap. It includes the characters in the SIL Private Use Area. It has built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics are properly placed. At present, it only contains the regular typeface; bold, italic, and bold-italic are not available. SIL plans to continue developing Doulos SIL in the future, for the regular typeface only.

Gentium Home Page — Gentium is a Unicode-encoded font designed by SIL member Victor Gaultney. At the moment, it includes regular and italic typefaces, but not bold or bold-italic. It supports both ancient and modern Greek. At present, it does not include the characters in the SIL Private Use Area. It does not have built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics may not be properly placed. SIL plans to continue developing Gentium in the future.

The Microsoft font Arial Unicode MS is a Unicode-enabled font that is very similar to Sophia. It includes the International Phonetic Alphabet characters. It does not, however, include bold, italic, or bold-italic typefaces, nor does it have built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics may not be properly placed.

Legacy Fonts

SIL IPA93 2.0 Home Page — SIL IPA93 (sometimes referred to as the SIL IPA Encore fonts) encodes the version of the International Phonetic Alphabet adopted in 1993 (and revised slightly in 1996). The font set includes three type faces: Doulos (similar to Times New Roman), Sophia (similar to Univers), and Manuscript (monospace). These fonts include regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic typefaces, allowing for near-publication quality typesetting. SIL has not produced a Unicode-encoded version of Sophia or Manuscript (but see “Doulos SIL” above). There are no plans for further development of the SIL IPA93 font set.

SIL IPA 1.2 Home Page — SIL IPA encodes the version of the International Phonetic Alphabet adopted at the 1989 Kiel convention. The font set includes three type faces: Doulos (similar to Times New Roman), Sophia (similar to Univers), and Manuscript (monospace). These fonts do not include bold, italic, or bold-italic typefaces. In addition, this version of the IPA has been superceded by a revision done in 1993. SIL no longer recommends the use of this font set. There are no plans for further development of the SIL IPA font set.

Frequently Asked Questions about the SIL IPA and SIL IPA93 (legacy) fonts

Important

The SIL Encore IPA and SIL IPA93 fonts are obsolete, symbol-encoded fonts. Their use is discouraged. If you decide to download and use these fonts, please note there is no user support for these fonts.

Other IPA Resources

IPA Unicode codepoints

The official IPA site does not currently give us the Unicode codepoints for the official IPA (although the newest verion of “The IPA Handbook” ( IPA Handbook) does have the Unicode codepoints listed in the back). There are several places you can check for this information. Try

Another resource for answering this kind of question (and maybe avoiding having to figure it out yourself!) is the SIL IPA93 conversion map or the IPA Unicode Keyboards.

IPA Unicode Keyboards

IPA Unicode Keyboards Lorna A. Priest and Joan Wardell, 2008-10-06; 63730 reads

This page contains keyboards created for typing in IPA data.

On Windows, two keyboarding options are available: an IPA Keyman keyboard and keyboards which work through the Windows keyboarding system (MSKLC) for US and UK keyboard layouts.

We also now provide an IPA keyboard for Linux as a debian package.

Installable keyboards for Mac OS X version 10.2, designed to allow entry of Unicode 5.0 IPA characters. Includes Dvorak version.

IPA Character Picker Utility

Unicode character pickers — Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. The phrase appears at the bottom of the screen and you can easily cut and paste the result into your own document. Pickers are likely to be most useful if you don't know a script well enough to use the native keyboard. The arrangement of characters also makes it much more useable than a regular character map utility.

Conversion to Unicode

SIL IPA93

SIL IPA93 Data Conversion Lorna A. Priest, 2007-07-05; 46014 reads

Step-by-step instructions on how to convert Microsoft Word, text or Standard Format (sfm) documents that use SIL IPA93 fonts in order to use Unicode fonts.

SIL IPA (1990)

A mapping file for converting SIL IPA (1990) data to Unicode is available here.

Amer Phon SILDoulos font

A mapping file for converting Amer Phon SILDoulos data to Unicode is available here.

IPA-SAM phonetic fonts

A mapping file for converting IPA-SAM phonetic data to Unicode is available here.

Pitch Contours and Tone in Unicode

This document gives an overview of most of the ways you can mark tone in Unicode. It also outlines the encoding and implementation of the 9-level pitch contours which were added to our SIL Unicode Roman fonts (Doulos SIL Font Home and Charis SIL Font Home) and in the SIL IPA keyboards.

Marking Tone in Unicode and the SIL Corporate PUA
Lorna A. Priest, 2007-02-01
Download "PitchContours.v1.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 515KB [9813 downloads]

Page History

2007-05-30 LP: added link to PitchContours document

2007-03-02 LP: added link to IPA-SAM map

2006-10-13 SH: added warning under legacy fonts

2006-03-10 LP: added link to IPA93 FAQ

2006-02-20 LP: fixed references to beta fonts

2005-11-23 LP: added link to labiodental flap