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Re: [Groff] Looking for a phonetic font


From: Peter Holtse
Subject: Re: [Groff] Looking for a phonetic font
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 17:02:45 +0200 (MET DST)

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000 address@hidden wrote:

> On 09-Aug-00 Peter Holtse wrote:
> > University College, London, distribute a set of TrueType fonts
> > developed by SIL (www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/fonts.htm) and
> > (www.sil.org). Adobe sells a set of similar PostScript fonts
> > with a different symbol mapping which is readily adaptable for
> > groff use. I have enclosed a listing of the symbolic names we
> > are using in our department to allow (relatively) easy switching
> > between regular text and phonetic script. 
> 
> The listing shows a total of 308 symbols (if I counted right).
> 
> The freely downloadable Hoekwater fonts I mentioned earlier have 255.
>
The fontset we bought from Adobe consists of six loadable files
with all non-control positions filled, i.e. about 192 chars per font.
The set of fonts comprises three different each containing two different
charsets: often used IPA symbols and the really odd ones, with a small
amount of overlapping among certain diacritics. Thus each typeface
contains more than 350 different symbols in two files. (The three
typefaces by the way are Times, StoneSans and StoneSerif. The
example I distributed was in StoneSans, which is what we normally use.)

When we prepared the fonts for groff-use, we included two fonts
named IPA and IPAX in the normal way: Two new slots in the DESC file
and tow new files containing charmaps, kerning widths etc. Since nobody
felt like working with two parallel fonts in order to do their
phonetic scripting we created a pseudo font looking like this:

.char   \[w-inv]    \f[IPA]\N'247'      \" winverted
.char   \[x-super]    \f[IPA]\N'248'    \" crosssuperscript
.char   \[l-palat]    \f[IPA]\N'249'    \" yturned
.char   \[z-retro]    \f[IPA]\N'250'    \" zrighttail
.char   \[oesmall]    \f[IPA]\N'251'    \" oelig
.char   \[low-rise]    \f[IPAX]\N'34'   \" lowrising
.char   \[arch-super]    \f[IPAX]\N'38' \" archsuperscript
.char   \[high-rise]    \f[IPAX]\N'39'  \" highrising
.char   \[voiceless-super]    \f[IPAX]\N'42'    \" ring
.char   \[plus]    \f[IPAX]\N'43'       \" plus
.char   \[hyphen]    \f[IPAX]\N'45'     \" hyphen
.char   \[dot]    \f[IPAX]\N'46'        \" periodcentered
.char   \[erh]    \f[IPAX]\N'50'        \" schwarighthook
.char   \[colon]    \f[IPAX]\N'58'      \" colon
.char   \[semicolon]    \f[IPAX]\N'59'  \" semicolon
.char   \[=-super]    \f[IPAX]\N'61'    \" equalsuperscript
.char   \[gl-stop-super]    \f[IPAX]\N'63'      \" glottalstopsuperscript
.char   \[schwa-super]    \f[IPAX]\N'64'        \" schwasuperscript

this allows us to write all phonetic scripts in symbolic form
which is much nicer for purposes of proof reading. Several of the
names were changed from the internal PostScript names, which
mostly reflected the creating artist's view, to labels more congenial
to a phonetician's nomenclature.
Also, this procedure allows us to hide the font changes (and the choice of
IPA or IPAalternate) from the ordinary user. Now they only complain that
the phonetic transciption of 'ring' as:  \[r-flap]\[i-lax]\[ng]   is
tedious to type. So for the really lazy we supply a special preprocessor
which allows each user to define his own key-mappings.

 
> I have had a look at the fonts downloadable from the SIL website:
> these have only 223 symbols, as far as I can see. Also, I found that
> the SIL Type 1 fonts did not work completely after being installed
> in groff (some symbols would not print). SIL also distribute a
> sold version, but I have not looked at this.
> 
> >From the UCL website, I also inferred that the UCL fonts are for sale.
> 
> Are the extra (over and above 255) characters defined in separate
> files? Are they available in Type-1 format?

The Stone/Times-family as supplied by Adobe were Type-1 complete with
afm/pfb-files. 


> 
> Ted.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749
> Date: 09-Aug-00                                       Time: 15:05:56
> ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
> _______________________________________________
> Groff maillist  -  address@hidden
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> 



--------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Holtse
--------------------------------------------------------------
IAAS / Linguistics Dpt --  University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 96, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
phone (+45) 353 286 43
fax   (+45) 353 286 35


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