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Phonetic Transcription Non-Unicode Workarounds

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If you are afraid that not all your viewers have access to recent Unicode compliant browsers, then these workarounds may help you place phonetic symbols on the Web

This Page

  1. Images or PDF
  2. HTML Formatting Tags
  3. Greek Letter Entity Codes
  4. Back to Browser Configurations for Phonetics
  5. Unicode Numeric Entity Codes (New Page)

Images or PDF

The safest options are to use image files or convert a word-processing file into a PDF file. However there are some  HTML tags and entity codes that will work for more recent browsers.

Note: Avoid using special non-Unicode phonetics fonts in your Web site. Fonts may not always be available and some versions of a font differ between Windows and Macintosh.

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HTML Formatting Tags

These are some HTML tags which can help you mimic certain symbols. Technically speaking, they are not "correct Unicode", but will work in almost all cases.

Superscript and Supbscript

You can use the <sup></sup> and <sub></sub> tags respectively to generate superscript and subscript letters in most recent browsers. See examples below:

HTML - g<sup>w</sup>
Result - gw

HTML - C<sub>0</sub>
Result -C0

Strikethrough

The tags <strike></strike> can be used to generate letters with a strike through bar:

HTML - hors<strike>i</strike>z
Result - horsiz

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Greek Letter Entity Codes

New entity codes for Greek letters have been introduced, and are supported in recent browsers including Firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.
Note: These are not supported in Netscape 4.7.

Test of Greek Entity Codes

&Alpha; = Α | &alpha;= α | &Beta; = Β | &beta; = β and so forth

 

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This Web page maintained by Teaching and Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services. For questions or comments on this Web page, please contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).
Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.
Last Modified: Friday, 27-Jun-2008 14:46:36 EDT