Using Unicode IPA on the web and in word processing

Gabe Webster
University of Washington Language Learning Center

Introduction

Currently, documents that contain IPA characters, including web pages, are not easily portable between computers and platforms. Portability problems arise generally because the IPA font used to create a document on one computer is not compatible with whatever IPA font is present on a different computer, if any is installed at all. Furthermore, most IPA fonts use the same range of character code numbers as non-IPA fonts, which can cause problems if the font is changed for any reason.

The Unicode encoding system offers a solution to these problems. In Unicode, each IPA character is assigned a standardized encoding number, so that no IPA character encoded in Unicode is ever confused as another IPA character, let alone as any other character of any of the world's languages. In principle, then, Unicode offers an end to documents and web pages in which IPA characters show up as question marks and boxes. In reality, Unicode IPA is mostly functional on current computers, but some initial configuration is often required, and some tasks are difficult to perform on some platforms.

This presentation focuses on creating and viewing Unicode-encoded web pages and word processing documents on PCs running Windows 2000 and Macs running Mac OS X. (Mac OS 9 is essentially not Unicode-compatible.)

Contents

(This presentation follows an order of “easiest to do” to “hardest to do” rather than any order which is conceptually coherent.)