![]() ![]() ![]() The IPA-SAM fonts are 8-bit fonts that I created around fifteen years ago.What are these fonts, so brusquely prescribed? One of the following IPA fonts is to be used for congress papers:.The Call for Papers page on the conference website gives the following instructions about phonetic symbols in submitted papers. The deadline for paper submission is the beginning of March, so it’s time for everyone to get their thoughts in order and start writing. The next ICPhS is due to be held in Hong Kong in a few months’ time. (If you’re interested, here’s the printed version.) I celebrated this progress and documented the details in the poster paper I gave at the 2007 International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Saarbrücken. (OK, there may be marginal cases where the font you are using falls down over one or two unusual symbols: but then you will probably see a blank square or something similar - you won’t see the wrong phonetic symbol or some ludicrous webding, as used to happen.) In this blog I can be confident that when I input a particular phonetic symbol you will see that same phonetic symbol on your screen, no matter where you are and no matter what platform you are using. So we no longer have to keep switching fonts merely in order to include phonetic symbols. A single font can now contain thousands, indeed tens of thousands, of different characters. Nowadays we all use Unicode, the internationally agreed industry-wide font-encoding standard for all alphabets and scripts, covering all the languages of the world as well as all the phonetic (and other) symbols we might need. Do you remember the bad old days before Unicode? The time when there was no standardized way of encoding phonetic symbols? when word processing was single-byte and fonts were 8-bit, so that any given font was limited to under two hundred characters? when the various phonetic fonts available all used different encodings, so that where one person had input ɥ another might see ɦ or ʰ or something else entirely arbitrary? when if you transferred a document to a different computer you would as likely as not get garbage for your phonetic symbols? when your Powerpoint presentation using the computer supplied by local organizers would probably fail to display your phonetic symbols properly? ![]()
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