From: Alec Coupe (A.Coupe@latrobe.edu.au)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2005 - 00:41:44 CST
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I should have been more
precise in the original posting and asked why all designers of
unicode-complaint IPA fonts, whose principal application is allegedly
phonetics, follow the tradition of allowing LATIN SMALL LETTER A
(U+0061) to change to LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA (U+0251) when it's
italicized. However, this isn't my field, so pardon my ignorance - I'm
just looking for a unicode-compliant font I can use for representing the
phonological systems of my research languages. The only response to the
posting that had any appreciation of the problem was from Vlad, who
wrote:
This certainly is an issue, I think. While LATIN LETTER ALPHA
has restricted variation--it can only appear with the glyph needed for
phonetic transcription--LATIN SMALL LETTER A does not: it may appear
with either the two-storey glyph or the one-storey (the latter
especially in italic fonts, but also in a fair few non-italic fonts).
This means that not all fonts can be used for phonetics, and (if
you're putting text on a website, say) you can have no guarantee that it
will be displayed correctly on the viewer's end. And it won't simply
display as a box or other glyph to let the user know that his or her
software cannot display the appropriate character--it will display as a
different glyph that, in this context, is misleading.
I hope this can also be appreciated by designers of unicode-compliant
fonts with all the IPA extensions. At the moment there is none available
that doesn't have the rendering problem elucidated by Vlad.
Alec
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