9.228 phonetic & other fonts on the Web

Humanist (mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
Sun, 15 Oct 1995 16:43:49 -0400 (EDT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 9, No. 228.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: Eric Johnson <johnsone@jupiter.dsu.edu> (13)
Subject: Phonetic symbols for the Web

[2] From: Don Fowler <don.fowler@Jesus.oxford.ac.uk> (18)
Subject: Re: 9.225 phonetics: translator? fonts?

[3] From: "James R. Adair" <jadair@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu> (22)
Subject: Re: 9.225 phonetics: fonts?

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 1995 06:09:12 -0500 (CDT)
From: Eric Johnson <johnsone@jupiter.dsu.edu>
Subject: Phonetic symbols for the Web

Dana Paramskas said

> I am attempting to create a WWW version of an applied linguistics
> course . . . . For part of the material, we need to be able to use
> phonetic symbols *incorporated* into the text (I realize that .GIF files
> can create phonetic symbols, but they cannot be integrated and also slow
> everything down).

Entity references can be used to represent a few of the standard phonetic
symbols on the Web. For example, a thorn can be entered as &thorn; or as
&#254; (most books about HTML give lists of entity references that can be
used). However, many standard phonetic symbols are not available as
entity references, and thus some kind of graphic representation will be
necessary.

-- Eric Johnson
johnsone@jupiter.dsu.edu

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 1995 13:41:35 +0100 (BST)
From: Don Fowler <don.fowler@Jesus.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 9.225 phonetics: translator? fonts?

There is a quick and dirty method to display ANY font on the WWW, but it
has some drawbacks. If you can get a fixed-width (non-proportional)
TrueType version of the font you want, then Windows and Mac users using
Netscape (and maybe some other graphical browsers) can download that and
use it as their fixed width font. If you then tag the bits in the html
which you want in that font with a tag which would normally be
represented in a fixed-width font, then they will see the exotic font. Of
course any other material that would be in the fixed-width font (e.g.
gophers) will also be in the font, so one may well find oneself changing
back and forth - tiresome, but not impossible on the fly in netscape.
This method has been successfully used for Greek (including accents) on
the Perseus WWW site, whose URL is:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

****************************************************************************
* Don Fowler, Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Jesus College, Oxford OX 1 3DW.*
* Don.Fowler@Jesus.ox.ac.uk, Telephone (01865) 279700, Fax (01865) 279687. *
* Home Page: http://Jesus.ox.ac.uk/~dpf/ *
* Classics at Oxford: http://info.ox.ac.uk/~classics/ *
****************************************************************************

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 15:16:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: "James R. Adair" <jadair@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu>
Subject: Re: 9.225 phonetics: fonts?

It's certainly not impossible to use phonetic fonts over the WWW, it's
just that there's not a totally satisfactory way to do it. The easiest
way to do it is to follow the approach used at sites that deal with
non-Latin-based fonts: simply use a phonetic font as your fixed-width font
(i.e., tag it with <tt>). You will also have to make sure that everyone
viewing your Web pages uses the exact same font for _their_ fixed-width
font (or at least a font with the same character map)--announce at the top
of your Web page what font is being used. Both Netscape and Mosaic can be
configured to use a particular font from the person's local computer to
display the fixed-width characters. This whole endeavor assumes that the
font you use is available to everyone whom you want to view your page. In
other words, you ought to use a public domain font that is freely
available to everyone, and your probably ought to give the information
about where the font can be obtained as well (or, better, make it
available from your own site). Until HTML browsers allow specific fonts
to be associated with particular language choices (there's already a
<lang> tag in HTML 3!), this clunky workaround, and others like it, will
have to suffice. Of course, there's always SGML!

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------