[WikiEN-l] Re: Pronunciations and IPA/SAMPA at nohat.net

[David Friedland]

"Brion Vibber"  wrote
>
> Is there a problem with rendering those characters, or is it just that
> standard system fonts don't include them? If the latter, are there free
> fonts we could recommend to people?

I've done some more research this morning, and below is what I have
found. The following discussion is fairly technical, so I've
cross-posted to wikitech-l, and we should probably continue the thread
there if discussion remains this technical.

The Windows font "Lucida Sans Unicode" has all the Unicode IPA
Extensions, except for #686 "LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED H WITH FISHHOOK"
and #687 "LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED H WITH FISHHOOK AND TAIL", which are
apparently only used for some obscure branch of Chinese phonetics. In
other words, it has a complete set for almost all useful purposes.
Additionally, Lucida Sans Unicode seems to be included with most recent
flavors of Windows that I have encountered, although I could be wrong. I
haven't done any Mac testing yet because I am at work and my Mac is at home.

Secondly, Windows IE can be coerced into displaying the page

<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_of_disputed_pronunciation/IPA>

correctly by going to Tools -> Internet Options... -> Fonts... and
selecting Lucida Sans Unicode as "Web page font".

Furthermore, if a <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'"> tag
is placed around any IPA text, the IPA will be displayed correctly
regardless of what the font setting for "Web page font" is. Of course
this also works if e.g. if the line

.ipa { font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode" }

is included in the page's stylesheet and the <span> tag has class="ipa".

However, I don't seem to be able to put arbitrary <span> tags onto
Wikipedia pages, so I can't fix up [[List of words of disputed
pronunciation/IPA]] to display correctly by default in IE. I can insert
<div>s though, so I'm sure allowing <span>s is an easy fix. (For those
who don't know, a <span> is like a <div> except it doesn't make a new
paragraph, so it is the best way to change text style mid-paragraph)

So, what I think could be done immediately is to add the .ipa class to
the stylesheet and make some kind of wiki syntax to put <span
class="ipa"> tags around text in IPA, or least allow them to be manually
added. This will probably make most IPA text work correctly for many
more browsers than can currently view it.

Also, I agree that every instance, if not just the on each page, of IPA
text should have a link to a "IPA for English" page so people who are
unfamiliar with IPA can quickly figure out how to decipher it. I will
write that page write away.

- David