[net.text] Phonemic/phonetic typefaces

dww@stl.UUCP (David Wright) (03/11/86)

This is, as they say, "on behalf of colleagues not on the net" at
Cambridge University Linguistics Department.  They are working on
speech, especially with reference to accent, in relation to speech
synthesis/recognition, and publishing working papers with
phonetic/phonemic material included.  At present they have to put those
bits in by hand.  It seems to me that TeX could do a good job of
typesetting such material, IFF someone has made some suitable fonts.
We don't have Metafont working here, and anyway I don't know enough about
phonetic script to be able to design fonts for it.

Has anyone produced such fonts?

rajeev@sfsup.UUCP (S.Rajeev) (03/15/86)

> This is, as they say, "on behalf of colleagues not on the net" at
> Cambridge University Linguistics Department.  They are working on
> speech, especially with reference to accent, in relation to speech
> synthesis/recognition, and publishing working papers with
> phonetic/phonemic material included.  At present they have to put those
> bits in by hand.  It seems to me that TeX could do a good job of
> typesetting such material, IFF someone has made some suitable fonts.
> We don't have Metafont working here, and anyway I don't know enough about
> phonetic script to be able to design fonts for it.
> 
> Has anyone produced such fonts?


I know that someone at Bell Labs, Murray Hill has written a paper
describing a preprocessor for troff that produces the Sanskrit
Devanagari script. (If I remember right, the person's name is
A. Driscoll.) This might be of interest to you because Devanagari 
is an entirely phonetic script: each letter is a syllable. The
problems you might encounter with "phonetic script" (I assume
this is a script for English) are likely to be similar to those
presented by Devanagari.

			S. Rajeev   ihnp4!attunix!rajeev.