Setting up your computing for Unicode IPA

Working with Unicode IPA characters requires three things from your computer:

• You must be running an operating system that supports Unicode (i.e., Windows 2000 or Mac OS X).
• You must have an installed Unicode font that includes the IPA characters.
• You must use applications which take advantage of the Unicode support offered by the operating system.

If you want to input Unicode IPA characters as well as view them, you need a Unicode IPA character input method as well.

Most Windows 2000 machines are preconfigured to view Unicode IPA characters. Windows 2000 comes with the Lucida Sans Unicode font, which contains the Unicode IPA characters. A full Unicode font, Arial Unicode MS, is freely downloadable from Microsoft. Arial Unicode MS includes not only the IPA characters, but about 65,000 other Unicode characters.

Most Windows 2000 applications, including Word and Internet Explorer, support Unicode.

Windows 2000 does not include any input method for Unicode IPA, nor is any third-party input method available. Thus inputting Unicode IPA characters is largely an application-specific affair.

Mac OS X includes the Hiragino font family, which is a Unicode Japanese font that also includes most IPA characters. OS X can also read Windows 2000 (True Type) fonts. The True Type font Lucida Sans Unicode can be downloaded from the Department of Phonetics at the University College London. Arial Unicode MS could once be downloaded free from Microsoft's site, but has since been packaged only with Office XP and Publisher 2002. Each of these fonts can be installed in the Fonts folder in OS X (in the Library/Fonts folder at the hard disk or user folder level).

Currently, most native OS X applications are carbonized applications, meaning that they are directly ported from Mac OS 9 without adding support for Mac OS X capabilities such as Unicode. (The next generation of OS X applications will be Cocoa applications, which should support Unicode). Both Word v.X and Internet Explorer 5.1 are carbonized applications lacking Unicode support. Currently available applications with Unicode support include the TextEdit word processor, included with Mac OS, and the web browser OmniWeb.

Mac OS X includes a general Unicode input method which is slow and unintuitive, but no input method specifically for Unicode IPA. Thus inputting Unicode IPA characters is, like in Windows 2000, a mostly application-specific process.

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