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Fonts with transcription symbols and their standardization—a survey of prospects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009
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Phonetic typesetting has always been a difficult undertaking. As long as typesetting was the business of professional typesetters, the ordinary transcriptionist did not have to worry very much about this. Today, typesetting techniques are downgraded by a variety of other textprocessing machines, ranging from electrostatic printers, or other non-impact printers that use digitized font information, to impact printers, such as print-wheel and selectric typewriters (see Hsu (1982)). It is the output of this kind of printer that can be used for camera-ready copy. Moreover, the area of influence of the author is extended since he himself has access to such textprocessing machines (see the TEX user group movement, explained below). Some years ago, most of the text-processing machines were quite inflexible; they could not cope with additional symbols or additional fonts. Early attempts to make phonological and phonetic data representable in such textprocessing systems had to accept existing symbols, and mappings between existing standard symbols (the ASCII code, for example) had to be established, sometimes on the basis of similarity (& for epsilon, for example) (see Millar/Oasa (1981), Wothke (1981), Roach (personal communication, 1981). Now that it is possible to define character sets for matrix representation (Pfeiffer-Rupp (1981a), (1982a), Neuhaus (1983)), both for printer representation and for representation on a visual display (Pfeiffer-Rupp (1981b)), it is no longer necessary to operate with such makeshift devices—which demand an additional level of coding within the same alphabet and often lead to the idea that the ASCII code is adequate for everybody's purposes, which is what the graphics industry would like to hear from us.
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- Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association 1984