mbut0135@w203zrz.zrz.tu-berlin.de (Matthias Butt) (05/20/91)
Hello everyone! I have a few questions concerning the availability of IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) fonts in PostScript Type1 Format for the Macintosh. I am aware of the IPA Fonts from Linguists Software (IPA-Roman, IPA-Plus and IPA-Sans), because my university has bought them. However, I find they all look awful (except for those characters which are actually references to Adobe Times) and only one of them is type 1. Because they also cost quite a bit, I do not bother to buy them for private use but would rather try to make my own IPA. I need IPA quite often and after the Macintosh made a font maniac out of me I just cant bear bad type anymore! Creating a font from scratch, however, seems to be a major task and therefore I wanted to check first if anything better than the fonts mentioned already exists. Also I would like to know if there is something like a standard ASCII mapping for IPA characters. I find the mapping of the Linguists Software fonts quite odd (with square brackets [] on the keyboard position of braces {} e.g.), however, for the sake of document exchangability I feel I should stay consistent with any existing standards or quasi standards. As far as I know font-creation programms such as Fontographer possess the ability to create composite fonts, i.e. fonts that actually do not contain all characters but point to another font for some character definitions instead. This is a good thing since IPA contains quite a few standard characters. If I created (and eventually distributed) such a composite font which references some font that I can rely on being present in any Postscript printer (e.g. Palatino) would I have to seek any licensing agreement with the supplier of that font (i.e. Adobe)? Any comments or hints will be greatly appreciated! I will post a summary of results. Matthias