Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Finding fonts with IPA characters

[JJJ]

I have spent only a couple days with LaTeX (mostly Lyx), and most of that time has been spent trying to find suitable fonts.

I decline to use the TIPA fonts because I find them hideous. Appearance is extremely important to me. If that is the only kind of font that I can use to typeset works for linguistics, then I better go back to InDesign, much as I dislike the thought.

Installing extra fonts for LaTeX is not trivial, especially for a n00bie. It would be a lot easier if a font on CTAN had a PDF file showing all the glyphs in the font. But they don't so I'm trying to figure out another way to determine which fonts to try.

I tried installing XeTeX, which supposedly will allow me to use any font installed on my Ubuntu Intrepid computer, but I failed to get it working. If I follow the instructions and put the required lines in the document preamble I get an error message when I try to create a PDF.

Does a list of font packages for LaTeX exist that contains descriptions of what is inside the font?

Also, is it possible to have TIPA use a different font? Or is it hard wired to use Times?

[gmedina]

Hi,

...Does a list of font packages for LaTeX exist that contains descriptions of what is inside the font?...

The LaTeX Font Catalogue could be of interest to you.

[JJJ]

Thanks. That's some help - at least I can see what the font looks like. But I still can't tell whether it contains the glyphs for IPA. Installing fonts is a pain.

I installed XeTeX which is supposed to let me use any font on my computer. But I can't get it to work. I think I'm going to have to get it to work because it's the only way I'm going to get good looking IPA.

[phi]

There should be no problem with XeTeX. For example, try to compile the following minimal example with xelatex:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}


\begin{document}

\fontspec{DejaVu Serif}

ɓɤɶɷɚʘʁɟʁ

\end{document}

This works perfectly on my system.

[JJJ]

Thanks. I'm getting closer!

First, I want to use the Junicode font, so I changed your DejaVu Serif to Junicode. And it worked, sort of.

Second, I am using LyX, which has a GUI for document class and I can't figure out how not to have a document class in the GUI. So if I put it again in the preamble I end up with a conflict, so I just deleted "\documentclass{article}" from the preamble.

Third, I added \setromanfont{Junicode} to the preamble.

Then I copied and pasted your ɓɤɶɷɚʘʁɟʁ four times and set them all to huger, and individually to roman, italic, bold, and bold-italic.

In the output I got perfect results for the roman and italic, but the bold and bold-italic characters dropped out, with the exception of the hooktop b (implosive b), which did appear but only in the bold-italic, not in the plain bold. I produced the PDF by exporting from LyX first as pdflatex, then used xelatex at the command line to convert to PDF. I have attached the PDF.

Wondering if it was the font I checked in Character Map and Junicode does have those glyphs in all four fonts. But just to be sure I changed to a couple other fonts and got the same results. The other fonts that I used included Unicode compliant fonts from Summer Institute of Linguistics.

This is really interesting because I have the same problem in other apps with IPA characters dropping out when bold or bold-italic is applied. That is, on Ubuntu Intrepid it happens in OOo, Abiword, KWord and Scribus (except that OOo sometimes substitutes a generic glyph).

I don't know what that means. I assumed that LaTeX used its own PDF rendering engine that had nothing to do with the OS. But I have been using LyX for only three days now, so what do I know?