More browsers and phonetics Web sites are targeting a Unicode solution which is described below, but workarounds may still be needed for older browsers.
The following Unicode fonts include a comprehensive set of phonetic characters and are free for academic use.
The following browsers have the most consistent results.
IPA Unicode Test Text: θɪs ə ənʌðər tɛst
Internet Explorer for Windows does not display phonetic symbols by default. Users who prefer Internet Explorer for Windows should set the Latin font to Arial Unicode MS or some other Unicode script with phonetic symbol support.
Internet Explorer for Macintosh does not support IPA Unicode symbols.
These programs provide a pop-up window which allows you to insert different phonetic characters. See pages for installation and usage instructions.
If you need to type phonetic symbols often, you may want to install phonetic keyboard utilities designed to work with the SIL Doulos and SIL Charis fonts.
Here are instructions for the UCL Unicode Phonetic Keyboard phonetics keyboard. This is a freeware package from the University College London. Note that activation instructions are similar to those for the U.S. International Keyboard.
Note: The UCL Unicode Phonetic keyboard is available in the Student Computing Labs.
One option is to use Global Writer and switch to the IPA keyboard which includes all the correct accents. Global Writer is available in the Student Computing Labs.
Here are the instructions for the IPA-SIL phonetics keyboard. This is a freeware package from SIL.org (although this is called an "alpha" version, it has been available for several years).
Note: The SIL Phonetic keyboard is available in the Student Computing Labs.
No matter which method you use to create the document, the HTML page must be declared as a Unicode page with the following meta-tag.
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
...
</head>
Use the keyboard resources listed above to generate IPA symbols in HTML documents.
If you cannot use a Unicode phonetics keyboard, then you can substitute numeric entity codes instead. For example:
See the Main Numeric Entity Code Chart and the Diacritic Chart for details.
Although it is generally not recommended to specify fonts for a language, it should be done for phonetic characters in order to force Internet Explorer to use the correct display display fonts.This can be done either via CSS styles or via the FONT tag. Below are the CSS style classes listing suggested font specifications.
.serifipa {font-family: "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", "Doulos SIL", "Gentium", "Junicode", "Cardo", "Aborigonal Serif","Arial Unicode MS"}
.ipa {font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"}
The following fonts are availble free for educational use and include all encoded phonetic symbols.
These keyboards can either be used to type text into an HTML editor or cut and pasted from a text editor. See the Web tips section for more details.
You can install these keyboard utilites on your computer to type phonetic characters.
These utilities let you type a character on a virtual keyboard, then cut and paste the symbols into a document.
