IPA Computer Support

Computing is the operation or use of computers. It includes the study of algorithmic processes and the development of both hardware and software. Unicode’s computing success unites character sets that are widespread and predominant use in the globalization of computer software. It has recently been implemented in many technologies, including modern programming languages and operating systems.

What is Unicode?

Developed in the 1980s, Unicode is a global strategy for text representation and is much improved from the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). Various versions of Unicode allow for the presentation of diverse languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. These languages are read differently than texts that use languages like Western alphabets, with need more complex glyphs in place of letters for a single phonetic sound.

Unicode is an information technology standard for consistently encoding text to digital media or print, whether for smartphones or laptops. The Unicode Consortium maintains the Unicode as a nonprofit focused on advancing the standards to make it easier to work across platform changes or other new media and technologies. Unicode supports nearly all of the IPA alphabet, extIPA, Combining Diacritical Marks, Phonetic Extensions, Phonetic Extensions Supplement, Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement, and characters elsewhere.  

IPA Numbers

After the 1989 Kiel Convention, most IPA symbols had a 3-digit code assigned to them. The idea was to identify the IPA symbols clearly during the new age of competing computer encodings. These numbers weren’t used much and have now been replaced by Unicode. 

There are 149,186 characters, including ten symbol blocks, and the IPA is one of them. The realm of Unicode symbols is extensive and includes chess symbols, domino tiles, emojis, ideograms, and some graphic symbols.

Typefaces & System Fonts

A typeface is a distinct print design, and a font is a certain weight, size, and style of a typeface. Various typefaces support IPA characters, but there are barely a dozen among the thousands of fonts that include all the symbols. 

Unicode-based fonts typically focus on supporting particular scripts, basic ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), and sets of characters or symbols. Documents and applications don’t need to generate characters from more than a few writing systems, so the fonts are scaled down to lessen the demand for resources in computing. Calibri is a proprietary font that is the default for Microsoft Office because it has nearly all the IPA characters and displays diacritic marks well. The widely used Times New Roman and Arial fonts have IPA characters, but neither one is complete, and they don’t make diacritics. 

Other Commercial Fonts

The Brill is a free designer font for non-commercial use with a complete set of IPA characters and diacritics. Every language from any era, including Cyrillic and Greek, is covered. Brill has over 5,100 characters, each available in roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. This font is favored by scholars studying ancient texts in any language. 

Free Fonts

Other free fonts that provide a wide variety of IPA symbols and good diacritics include:

• Gentium Plus
• Charis SIL
• Doulos SIL
• Andika

ASCII and Keyboard Transliterations

Some ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters have been mapped to IPA symbols through specific systems such as X-SAMPA and SAMPA. This method allows for IPA character keys that are generally unavailable on standard keyboards. Some operating systems offer alternative input methods because keyboards can’t cover the entire range. 

Methods for entering Unicode characters from code points have been standardized by ISO/IEC 14755. The primary method uses code sequences, and the screen-selection process displays a table of characters. Shapecatcher, you can draw a character in a box and get a list of approximate drawings with their code points. Unicode Lookup has a search function and a list of characters with corresponding code points. 

IETF Language Tags

Identifying human languages on the world wide web requires a standardized code or tag called an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) language tag. The IETF BCP (Best Current Practices) 47 language tag is standard for identifying human languages on the internet. IETF language tags are combined with other standards to distinguish the variants of regions, countries, or scripts (writing systems). HTTP, HTML, XML, and PNG are some of the computing standards used by the IETF.

Computer Input Using the On-Screen Keyboard

Unicode’s input of unique symbols on a computer is a common way to enter characters, not on a keyboard. Since most keyboards only have finite simple vital combinations, alternate input system methods allow access to much more. iOS has numerous keyboard layouts, including the “IPA Phonetic Keyboard.”

Keyboard layouts can have confusing key combinations for characters and not include all of them. Several operating systems provide alternative input methods allowing access to the entire range. The characters can be created by typing a particular key sequence or selecting them from a display. The advantage of using these methods for digital materials is the ease of copying them into another document or web page. The ASCII’s 96-character set is minimal compared to the hundreds of thousands produced by Unicode. It can also provide graphemes from languages worldwide as well as copious symbols and signs.