Re: Given Up on Roman Orthography
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 12, 1999, 5:57 |
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On Mon, 11 Jan 1999 23:54:28 +0100, Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
wrote:
>I'm not very keen on representing Boreanesian on the web via a IPA
>to ASCII scheme. IMO, there are no succesful ASCII-IPA schemes. But
>perhaps I can still have a web-page with IPA fonts? Can a web-page
>still be view with IPA-fonts if viewers have downloaded the SIL-IPA
>fonts? I'm not very computer literate.
Netscape 3.x could display SIL-IPA fonts, but unfortunately 4.0 can't,
because it's a symbol font. That's the main reason I still keep version
3.02 around even though I mainly use version 4.05.
On the other hand, the latest version of Netscape can display Unicode
documents, which can include IPA characters. For example, to get the
"epsilon" character, representing [E], you would type the sequence ɛ
(the semicolon is part of the sequence), and for a barred u, you would =
type
ʉ. Of course, the reader needs a Unicode font that includes the IPA.
The following line in the head of an HTML document tells the browser to =
use
Unicode:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=3D"content-type" CONTENT=3D"text/html; charset=3DUTF-8">
This doesn't work with earlier versions of Netscape, although version 3.x
can be convinced to display UTF-8 encoded documents if you specify
"charset=3DUNICODE-1-1-UTF-8" rather than just "charset=3DUTF-8", and if =
you go
into your Windows registry and know what flags to set. But that only =
works
with the 2 or 3-byte UTF-8 sequences that have the high bits of the
characters set, and not with the ʉ entities.
So there are two mutually incompatible ways to use IPA characters (I use
both on my Lhoerr page, =
http://www.io.com/~hmiller/Jarda/Lhoerr-uni.html),
another one that works with both old and new versions of Netscape but
includes 8-bit characters that might confuse other browsers and requires
editing your Windows registry, and the alternative of using inline GIFs =
for
each character of the IPA, which is a lot more cumbersome to use but at
least should work with most browsers.
My preference is to use the Unicode characters, and to distribute a free
True Type font (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/fonts/thryn___.ttf) that
includes the IPA characters. Anyone who wants to use the IPA on their web
site is welcome to distribute copies of the Thryomanes font as well.