Monday, March 17, 2014

Typing With The International Phonetic Alphabet


The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is not a language but a set of agreed special symbols for describing the pronunciation of any language. Within Unicode they are spread over a number of different blocks, and your OS X should be able to display them with the right fonts. The Wikipedia IPA page is a good way to test your fonts, as the charts there are available both as text and as images.

To input IPA in OS X you need to use the app IPA Palette, the OS X Character Palette, or a special keyboard, such as that created by SIL. Any modern word processor should work.  

3 comments:

Smokey Ardisson said...

Tom, that link to linguiste.org appears to be to some internal Blogger URL, not linguiste.org. Further, if I try to visit "linguiste.org" directly, I appear to get a "spam" page with some discussion of IPA and a lot of unrelated paragraphs/links, but no keyboard layouts :-(

Tom Gewecke said...

You are right, there used to be a screen keyboard there but it seems to be gone, just a chart now. I'll remove it.

JosephK said...

I can't get Mavericks to 'see' the IPA Palette! It worded fine in 10.6, but it refuses to turn up in Mavericks, despite many restarts. Very frustrating.