Template talk:IPA

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Template:IPA is permanently protected from editing, as it is a heavily used or visible template. Substantial changes should be proposed here, and made by administrators if the proposal is uncontroversial, or has been discussed and is supported by consensus. Use {{editprotected}} to attract the attention of an administrator in such cases. Any contributor may edit the template's documentation to add usage notes, categories or interwiki links.

See also: Template talk:Usage of IPA templates

[edit] Usage

Template:IPA contains

<span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA">{{{1}}}</span>

I.e., it simply specifies CSS class IPA.

This allows fixing broken display of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) characters in MS Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, and choice of style in any browser.

The font declarations are in MediaWiki:Common.css. Registered Wikipedia users can specify their own style for IPA text by editing, for each project, their user style sheet, e.g. monobook.css. Users can also specify the style locally in their browser, which works across projects.

An example, placing a phonetic rendering of the word characters in Template:IPA:

{{IPA|[ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z]}}

The result will be a span with a style attribute, like this:

<span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">[ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z]</span>

Which appears in your browser as:

[ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z]

Without template:IPA:

[ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z]

[The last two should only look different if you are using Internet Explorer on Windows, or if you have a custom style defined for IPA text.]

Please place all IPA text into Template:IPA, even if it doesn't have any special IPA characters, like this: [aj pi ej]. This will allow users to format all examples of IPA text consistently, with their choice of fonts, colours, etc.

[edit] Technical details

The class="IPA" attribute exists so that Wikipedia users can apply their own style sheets to text in Template:IPA. See #Applying custom styles to IPA text, below.

In MediaWiki:Common.css, the declaration for font-family lists a series of fonts that are known to contain IPA characters.

The second style declaration font-family /**/:inherit; overrides the preceding font declaration, and tells the text in Template:IPA to use the default font inherited from its surroundings, in every browser except MSIE 6.0. The empty comment placed just in the right spot confuses MSIE 6 and prevents it from applying this declaration. This is a documented way of hiding CSS from MSIE 6. [1] (site gone)

[edit] Criteria for fonts

Criteria for selecting fonts:

• Full IPA character set.
• Normal and bold weights, for emphasis.
• Sans-serif, matching Wikipedia's default font family.

Less important criteria:

• Having a wide range of other international characters.
• Having italics.

Do not surround font names with single quotes, because Wikipedia's software will escape them with backslashes. CSS recommends single quotes around font names with spaces, but doesn't require them.

[edit] About the fonts

Arial Unicode MS

• sans-serif
• regular only, but automatically generated bold & slanted works in Windows
• comes with MS Office for PC and Mac
• is not available for Linux through [2], but is available through distribution-specific methods (i.e. YaST)
• places double combining modifiers too far to the left by 1 em

Code2000

• serif
• shareware font from James Kass

Doulos SIL

• serif
• free font from SIL
• regular only

Gentium

• serif
• free font from SIL
• regular and italic only

Lucida Grande

• sans-serif
• comes with Mac OS X
• regular and bold only

Lucida Sans Unicode

• sans-serif
• comes with Windows XP
• doesn't include some IPA characters
  • double combining inverted breve

DejaVu Sans

• full family
• freely available from SourceForge
• very complete, also includes LGC (Latin-Greek-Cyrillic)

Free Sans Free Serif Free Mono

• full family
• freely available
• some possible display problems (bad hinting)

• • [what others?]

[edit] Applying custom styles to IPA text

You can apply your own custom styles using the .IPA class selector in your local style sheet. If you are a registered Wikipedia member, you can put custom styles into your monobook.css style sheet. For detailed instructions, see Help:User style.

Try this: place the following text into your own monobook.css page after logging in.

.IPA { color: green; }

If you want to see IPA displayed in a particular font, try something like this:

.IPA { font-family: 'Charis SIL', serif; }

You can also override Template:Unicode fonts by using .Unicode, and Template:Polytonic fonts by using .polytonic. Capitalization of these class names must be the same.

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation)
• Wikipedia:Pronunciation guide
• Template:IPA notice - notice indicating that an article contains IPA
• Template:ConvertIPA - notice for editors, that an article contains SAMPA or or pseudo-English transcription needing conversion to IPA
• Template:Polytonic - font specification for Polytonic Greek
• Template:Unicode
• Template:IPA2 - similar to this template, but adds the text "IPA:" before the transcription, and automatically puts the transcription in square brackets, thus {{IPA2|fəˈnɛɾɪk}} renders thus: IPA: [fəˈnɛɾɪk]

[edit] External links

• Alan Wood’s Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

[edit] Discussion

Just so people understand, this template forces its argument to appear in a <span> tag forcing the use of Unicode fonts. This ensures that users can see the IPA characters in Windows Internet Explorer, which otherwise doesn't display IPA characters for anonymous users. Nohat 18:21, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I'd say that matching the rest of the page and having bold characters is more important. A well-written browser will substitute characters from a different font if the specified font doesn't have those characters. Of course if the most common browser were well-written, we wouldn't need this template at all. However, we do need it, but we shouldn't degrade the appearance of pages for users whose browsers are well-written. Therefore, a an attractive, well-matched font with roman and bold characters should be the primary criteria. Code2000 is widely regarded as a font of last resort due to its ugliness (as well as its non-freeness) and doesn't match the rest of the pages because it's a serif font: sans-serif is specified for body text in Wikipedia's CSS. Nohat 07:04, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Are there any instances on Wikipedia where IPA is formatted in bold-face? I can't think of a situation where it would be desirable. —Michael Z. 16:17, 2005 Jan 9 (UTC)

It's used on several pages to highlight particular symbols in a transcription. See [3] Nohat 19:37, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Good example. I've updated the criteria, and took the liberty of moving discussion down here. —Michael Z. 01:17, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

[edit] Unicode tables

Wouldn't it be useful to make a template that is just the desired CSS font arguments and use that template in table headers so you can avoid putting the IPA template in at every item in the table? I'm not sure how this would interact with Wiki table markup, but I think it would work.

Done, at Template:IPA fonts. It renders the following

 Chrysanthi Unicode, Doulos SIL, Gentium, GentiumAlt, Code2000, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Cyberbit, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro, Matrix Unicode

It's just the font list, so it can be used in a style attribute to specify font-family or font, or even (heaven forfend) in a <font> element. I've put it into template:IPA, so the font list for all IPA in Wikipedia can be edited in one place. —Michael Z. 01:59, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

Also, as you probably remember I made a separate Unicode template a while back. In that template we recently changed the order of the fonts. What is your logic for the order you're using? It would be good to put the logic here in the talk page. --Chinasaur 19:40, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The logic has been changing as users have edited this template. See the history, and the font list above, for some insight. If the activity settles down, maybe I'll write it out for this talk page. —Michael Z. 01:59, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

[edit] Arial Unicode MS bugs

AxSkov, which IPA characters does Arial Unicode MS have that Lucida Sans Unicode does not? The reason I want to move Arial further down the list is that it has a bug in the way it displays double combining modifiers (which are used to represent some affricates). See Talk:International Phonetic Alphabet#Other symbols for the technical details and examples. —Michael Z. 21:56, 2005 Jan 8 (UTC)

After doing some testing, it appears to me that Lucida Sans Unicode doesn't include those characters anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter which MS font comes first in that regard. I've put Lucida Grande first, so Mac OS X users will see it correctly even if they happen to have the MS fonts. Lucida Grande doesn't have italics, but I think IPA would never be italicized anyway. —Michael Z. 22:22, 2005 Jan 8 (UTC)

[edit] Replace with IE-specific style sheet class

I'd like to propose changing the way Template:IPA works, so that it only has an effect in MSIE 6 for Windows. This requires two changes:

1. Add a style sheet directive to Wikipedia's existing MSIE-only style sheet [4]:

.IPA { font-family: Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS,
       Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; }

2. Edit Template:IPA so that it applies the IPA class:

<span class="IPA"> [content] </span>

To specify IPA in a different scope (e.g., a table or a div), an editor can simply add class="IPA" as an HTML attribute. Multiple classes can be specified: class="toccolours IPA". Users can also use the .IPA selector to specify styles in their own user style sheets at User:XXX/monobook.css.

We'll need the co-operation of an admin or developer to change the style sheet.

Why?

• The font specification is only required for one browser: MSIE 6/Windows. It's a hack.
  • Other modern browsers automatically substitute fonts containing the characters (Mozilla, Firefox, Safari)
  • Some older browsers won't display IPA anyway (MSIE 5/Mac)
• The current method needlessly overrides the font display for other browsers, including user-selected fonts, and may break the display. It will override:
  • Web browser's default font
  • Web browser's automatic font substitution (e.g., if the default font doesn't have IPA characters
  • User's selected font in browser preferences
  • User's local style sheet
  • Wikipedian's fonts specified in User:XXX/monobook.css.
• Users might be tempted to use this for other Unicode character ranges, where it may may degrade display in other browsers (I've already seen it happen). If its application is restricted to a single Windows browser, then changes are less likely to do any damage.
• This solution allows registered Wikipedians to specify their own font for IPA in their monobook.css style sheet.

Disadvantages:

• The font specification list would live in a style sheet, where it can only be edited by an admin or developer.

Any comments? —Michael Z. 20:22, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

[edit] MSIE/Win only version

After I wrote the proposal above, I got an idea. Template:IPA now looks like this:

<span class="IPA" style="font-family:Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS, 
     Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; font-family:inherit;">

• The second font-family declaration overrides the first, in CSS-compliant web browsers.
• MSIE/Win doesn't understand the inherit value, so it still applies the fonts.
• The class="IPA" attribute allows users to specify their own styles. Add something like this into your style sheet, at User:XXX/monobook.css (where XXX is your user name):

.IPA { color: red; }

—Michael Z. 20:40, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

• The problem is that on IE6/XP the second font-family spec overrides the first, and so, unless there's an "inherit" font installed, it winds up reverting to whatever font is used in the surroundings of the embedded span (it inherits, in other words!). I've tried putting the special "inherit" tag at the beginning of the fontlist, but that didn't work either. IE seems to function OK if the inherit tag is at the end of the fontlist (current revision), but I have no way of testing what it does on other platforms. A. Shetsen 22:31, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Aw crap—that browser's brokenness has cost me hundreds of hours of work. I read in my reference that it doesn't support "inherit", but never thought that the reference to a non-existent font would completely replace the previous declaration. I'm going to try something else. If I revert it temporarily it's because I'm doing some testing. —Michael Z. 23:03, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

Oops. Same diff as with font-family. Seems a deeper solution is called for. OK. I'm installing MediaWiki on my Pentium 300 with 64 MB memory :). A. Shetsen 23:15, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ta-dah!!! on IE6. Thank you, Michael. Alex Shetsen. A. Shetsen 23:19, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[?] I tried something else, but it didn't work so I reverted the template. Looks like it's back to plan A: #Replace with IE-specific style sheet class, which should be quite easy to do if we can find a helpful admin. —Michael Z. 23:27, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

Okay, I'm going to try something else. I found two CSS filters to hide CSS from MSIE. I'll see if these can work. —Michael Z. 07:10, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

1. The !important property doesn't work in MSIE4, 5 and 6, so the second declaration should override the first in these browsers.

<span class="IPA"style="font-family:inherit !important; font-family:Lucida Grande, 
     Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000;">

Inherits font-family in Firefox/Mac, but applies the second declaration in MSIE6/Win (good), Firefox/win and Safari (not what we want).

2. spaced empty comment in the property should hide the declaration from MSIE6/Win only.

<span class="IPA" style="font-family:Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS, 
     Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; font-family /**/:inherit;">

Method 2 seems to work right. Inherits font-family in Safari and Firefox, but applies the IPA font spec in MSIE6/Win. YAY! Please look at some IPA and tell me if everything looks right to you. —Michael Z. 07:40, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

Not any more, and your link is down. Yecril (talk) 22:52, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

• Looks good!! I've tested it with and without my custom monobook.css file. IPA and the rest of the conten display well on my XP/IE6 combo. Thank you!! A. Shetsen 19:02, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Phew! I was starting to get discouraged. I'm still going to see about adding the .IPA font declaration to a browser-specific style sheet, but it's nice to get it working as it should. —Michael Z. 00:25, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)

Looks very good on a common public computer with no particular extras added. This is a REAL improvement! Kudos!
--Ruhrjung 13:41, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Attention, Australia!

Dear anonymous user from Australia (203.164.184.61, etc.),

Why do you keep changing this template? It's set up to work around a font-display inadequacy in MS Internet Explorer for Windows, and to not do anything in other web browsers. There's an explanation in #Technical details, above. If you're changing it for another reason, please let us know here.

You can override the font display for yourself only, by putting something like the following in your browser's user style sheet, or by registering as a Wikipedia user and putting it in your own Wikipedia style sheet. Registration has other benefits, too.

 .IPA { font-family: Arial Unicode MS; }

—Michael Z. 2005-01-22 16:54 Z

[edit] Using the template

It's important, if surrounding the IPA characters with slashes or square brackets, to put these inside the IPA template, for instance {{IPA|/.../}}, rather than /{{IPA|...}}/, as otherwise a spurious space will appear after the leading slash or bracket. I realised this after seeing some of my edits corrected by User:Angr. rossb 06:57, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yup. I don't think it used to do this; anyone know if template behaviour has changed in the last week or two? —Michael Z. 2005-02-18 16:13 Z

In my opinion the brackets should be integrated to the Template already. Stern 07:59, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well, sometimes you want to use square brackets, sometimes you want slashes, and sometimes you don't want any brackets at all. And if you had three separate templates, the names of the templates would probably be longer than the two keystrokes it takes to type a pair of brackets. Compare {{IPA-slashes|bim}} {{IPA-brackets|bim}} {{IPA-plain|bim}} with {{IPA|/bim/}} {{IPA|[bim]}} {{IPA|bim}} Nohat 08:53, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Links

Like in the german Wikipedia (see de:Enschede for example) the IPA-code should link to Wikipedia's IPA page. In the german Wikipedia the Template follows always directly after the first time the text's name is used -- without any description. Thats better than in the english Wikipedia. Stern 08:04, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The problem with linking the IPA transcriptions themselves is the underline that is standard in the link can get in the way of deciphering which symbol is present, particularly if there are diacritics that appear below the letter. But even disregarding that, the difference between the symbol for the velar nasal and the palatal nasal would probably be hard to discern if there were an underline crossing through the descenders. Nohat 08:53, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I do like the usage without a label, but I agree that a link is problematic. If the usage becomes a commonly-used convention, then I think it can stand without explanation, just as it does in paper dictionaries or encyclopedias. —Michael Z. 2005-03-17 15:58 Z

How about adding something like " [[International Phonetic Alphabet|*]]" to the template? J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 17:00, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

I for one don't want to link to the International Phonetic Alphabet page every single time I use the IPA template. Sometimes I prefer to link to International Phonetic Alphabet for English or IPA chart for English, or nothing at all because I'm using the template for the twentieth time in the same paragraph. Also all those asterisks before linguistic forms would make people think they were either reconstructed or ungrammatical. --Angr/_comhrá 17:43, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

That's true, the asterisks would be too confusing. What do you think about adding a title-attribute:

<span title="This is an IPA-transcription; see: International phonetic alphabet." class="IPA" style="white-space: nowrap; font-family:{{IPA fonts}}; font-family /**/:inherit;">{{{1}}}</span>

This would look like this: /aɪ æm ən ɪgzɑːmpl/. J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 18:13, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

That's pretty good. I would edit the title slightly: /aɪ æm ən ɪgzɑːmpl/.

I would also be in favour of linking the text to International Phonetic Alphabet, and using CSS to prevent underlining. —Michael Z. 2005-05-2 23:51 Z

If we'd include "Pronunciation of xxx" in the title, then the template must include a regular spelling of the transcribed phrase. This would be possible, but it would be a major work to do so. Aditionally, I don't think it would be necessary, since the transcription will most of the times be preceded by a regular spelling version.

I've tried to make the css disappear the underline. However, this css is overwritten by the settings in the preferences (and probably by browser settings as well). If we look what the following produces:

[[International Phonetic Alphabet|<span class="IPA" style="text-decoration:none; white-space:nowrap; font-family:{{IPA fonts}}; font-family /**/:inherit;">{{{1}}}</span>]]

Then we see that the underline stays: /aɪ æm ən ɪgzɑːmpl/. J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 09:52, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

It's text-decoration: none, but it won't work in an inline style, because the style sheet's :hover selector is more specific. To make this work we need the co-operation of an admin who can edit monobook.css. —Michael Z. 2005-05-3 15:31 Z

[edit] Hundreds of IPA codes ...

... can be found here and can be copied to the english Wikipedia. Stern 08:06, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. Some of these will be helpful, although I must confess some of them are quite amusing, such as the British pronunciations of American places. [ˈaːkənsɔː] and ['ʌɪdəhəʊ], indeed! Nohat 09:05, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sometimes the template makes it worse!

I've been adding the IPA template to the Brazilian Portuguese article, which had a lot of IPA without the template, but there are one or two characters that are worse with the template than without it. Notably #7869 displays correctly wihout the template — ẽ , but as the null glyph with the template — ẽ . Any suggestions? rossb 10:07, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Font problem. The current font order is Code2000, Gentium, Lucida Sans Unicode, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Grande (Template:IPA_fonts). Both Code2000 and Gentium contain the character, but Lucida Sans Unicode does not. I suspect you do not have Code2000 or Gentium, but do have LSU. Since Arial Unicode MS also includes the character, I'll move that one before Lucida. Jordi·✆ 10:19, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This seems to have cured the problem! rossb 13:39, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] SAMPA

I have created Template:SAMPA and Template:IPA-SAMPA, the first simply a class wrapper for SAMPA code in the same vein as the IPA class, the second is for pages where both IPA and SAMPA are given, and allows the user to turn off one or the other based on their preference, such as:

.IPA { color: green; }
.IPA-SAMPA .SAMPA { display: none; }

Nicholas 22:17, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I think. I just hope people don't take this as an incentive to add gobs of hideous SAMPA to lots of articles. Nohat 01:16, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Concurrance, although Wikipedia policy is preference for IPA, I realise that some people may not be able to display IPA or may be familiar with SAMPA and not IPA, and prefer to see that. I originally did this in Received Pronunciation (2 October or so) with classes 'ipa' and 'sampa' but it got reverted for adding HTML tags liberally throughout the article. This template method is much better. Personally I'd never heard of SAMPA till I saw it on Wikipedia, and honestly can't agree more that it's the most hideous thing I've seen in linguistics :-) Nicholas 09:38, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think there are now very few articles in the English Wikipedia that still use SAMPA to show the pronunciation of a particular word. Several editors (including myself) have been systematically replacing it with IPA. it does of course still exist in specialist articles on linguistic matters, but could probably be largely removed there as well. I think it's unlikely that any significant number of people would be familiar with SAMPA and not IPA, give that SAMPA is merely a kludge for displaying IPA on computer systems that can't cope with IPA characters. And just about every modern dictionary I've looked at recently (in the UK) uses IPA. I think that American dictionaries may use other schemes, but I can't imagine SAMPA will be among them. rossb 18:49, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The real problem with this is that some articles will have just IPA, others just SAMPA. If I can't see the SAMPA, then I won't take the opportunity to quickly add the IPA (and probably nuke the SAMPA). —Michael Z. 2005-04-7 23:18 Z

I don't understand this point about not seeing the SAMPA. If the SAMPA is there, anyone can see it, it doesn't need any special characters (which is the whole point of it after all). In practice there should be almost no articles left that contain SAMPA and not IPA (other than a few more complex specifically linguistic articles, which if they don't have IPA should already have had their talk pages marked with the convertIPA template). rossb

I was referring to Nicholas' proposal of hiding SAMPA. —Michael Z. 2005-04-8 14:00 Z

[edit] No-wrap

Is the no-wrap meant to prevent breaks between syllables? Is IPA breaking at just any old letter, or just at the periods? Nowrap is not terrible, but it's a bit awkward in long bits in a narrow browser window, like in the intro for Nikita Khrushchev. —Michael Z. 2005-04-13 00:01 Z

Keep it. IPA examples should be short (one word or one sound only), and it is not nice if this is wrapped. Especially MSIE is horrid with this: it seems to want to create a horizontal scrollbar if an IPA snippet is wrapped even if otherwise not needed, because of serious errors in the font family handling. Jordi·✆ 00:14, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wrong characters

At least in my browser with the fonts I have installed, some IPA characters show up wrong. ɡ is supposed to be a handwritten g, i.e. identical to g in sans-serif fonts, but for me (at least, and presumably others as well) it shows up identical to γ (gamma from the Greek alphabet, not the IPA alphabet). Also ʁ, the inverted small capital R, is supposed to have the vertical stroke on the left, the rounded part on the lower right, and the diagonal in the upper right. But instead it's displayed with the vertical stroke on the right, the rounded part on the lower left, and the diagonal in the upper left. I don't know which font is creating these problems, but maybe we should stop using it. --Angr/_comhrá 19:46, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

These characters look correct on my browser here - I'm using plain vanilla IE6 on Windows 2003. rossb 21:51, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm using plain vanilla Netscape 7.2 on Windows XP. When I use IE it works. --Angr/_comhrá 22:34, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

look fine to me in Opera and MSIE on WinXP. Jordi·✆ 23:47, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Am I the only Wikipedian who uses Netscape? I even added ".IPA { font-family: Doulos SIL; Gentium; }" to my monobook.css page to force fonts that I know display the characters correctly, but it still doesn't work; those fonts don't show up. It's very confusing, because every IPA-containing sans-serif Unicode font I have installed on my computer (Arial Unicode, Lucida Sans Unicode, Microsoft Sans Serif) has those two characters correct when I use them on MS Word. --Angr/_comhrá 11:16, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

That should be .IPA { font-family: Doulos SIL, Gentium; }, with a comma. Try .IPA { font-family: Doulos SIL, Gentium !important; }, or making the selector more specific, like span.IPA { .... —Michael Z. 2005-04-15 15:22 Z

Thanks, Michael! I added both "span" before and "!important" after and now it works. --Angr/_comhrá 19:27, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Glad it worked. Also, because of WP's caching, I find I can't test changes to monobook.css or monobook.js. They'll just show up within a day or two. —Michael Z. 2005-04-15 19:32 Z

Well here it is over eight months later and I finally found out which font was causing all the trouble: MS Reference Sans Serif. I simply deleted it and now I don't need to specify anything in my monobook.css page and all the characters look right. Also, I'm using Mozilla Firefox now, not Netscape anymore. --Angr (t·c) 13:35, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

It's months later, and I'm still seeing the problem on some computers that run Firefox 1.5. Can we get the "!important" fix for the main monobook.css file on the site, so that individual users (who may not be CSS or even relatively computer literate) don't have to hack their systems to make it work? Dave 21:32, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Size?

IPA is often nigh-illegible with the default font size, so I've found myself increasing the text size just to see what's going on. I now have my monobook.css set to display IPA at 16pt which is much nicer. Any thoughts on this? It does stand out, but then so does the image rendering of math TeX markup. Probably something other than points would have to be used in the CSS since people may be using different base font sizes. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 21:49, May 23, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Showing tone diacritics in Firefox

With Firefox running on Mac OS 10.3.9 I can't get the diacritics for tones and and word accents to show upp properly. I just get the white boxes. However, when I helped Mark Dingemanse with some of his language articles, I noticed that when used in his vowel tables, they work like a charm! I tried with all kinds of tone diacritics, and they all seemed to work with his tables. Here's one of from Gbe languages:

Any idea why they show up properly with Marks method, but not with this template?

Peter ^Isotalo 16:56, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Try installing more fonts. For me (Firfox 1.0 on OS X 10.2.1) it works all right when I install TITUS Cyberbit Basic and Gentium. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 19:54, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

But the font families that are used in the table (Arial Unicode MS and Lucida Sans Unicode) are both present in the supporting Template:IPA fonts. Surely that must mean that the problem somehow lies in the template, not the lack of fonts. And since bishonen complained about the same problem, and is also using Firefox and OS 10, I suspect there are others who are having the same problem.

Peter ^Isotalo 20:27, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

For reference, here are the characters from the table above:

• no formatting: ĩ, ũ, ẽ, õ, ə̃, ɛ, ɛ̃, ɔ, ɔ̃, ã
• with template:IPA: ĩ, ũ, ẽ, õ, ə̃, ɛ, ɛ̃, ɔ, ɔ̃, ã

—Michael Z. 2005-05-25 21:08 Z

Those show fine for me with Opera 8.01/Windows, so if multiple Firefox/OSX users have a problem it must be a platform issue (browser or OS), not a problem with the template. Jordi·✆ 23:08, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

That's what I think, too. When I remove the fonts I've mentioned, then not all the signs will show up correctly, even though when I copy paste them to a Unicode compliant application (such as TextEdit), all of them appear. There seems to be a problem with certain Mac OS X fonts on Firefox. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 09:22, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

But how can it not be a template problem if the fonts work fine in the table but not in the template? It doesn't seem particularly constructive to claim that an OS is incompatible with a template which is designed specifically to fix these problems. Telling me to get more fonts is fine and all, but this will obviously be a problem to other users as well.

Peter ^Isotalo 15:11, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

The template is designed to only affect the font display in MSIE/Windows, which has some major font display inadequacies. It shouldn't affect Firefox, Safari, etc. at all.

In the table above, the font specification affects all browsers, if the specified fonts are present. —Michael Z. 2005-05-26 16:28 Z

In the appropiate place (which one?), there should be a note that Firefox/Mac OS X has some troubles with some fonts (which ones with which ones?). The signs I have most troubles with are the tone signs: Unless I activate Gentium or Titus, I'll only see ? ? ? ? ? (or nothing at all) instead of ˥ ˦ ˧ ˨ ˩, even though they all show up correctly when I copy paste them to TextEdit. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 23:05, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I use safari in mac 10.3.9. I think the problem has to do with what fonts are specified. The template does not affect anything at all for me, this is because of the font-family /**/:inherit; declaration. In Mark's table above, the font-family is specified and thus affects what is displayed. Whatever font is specified by the Mac browsers does not display the diacritics correctly. You can see this by comparing the tables below (I dont use Code2000, Chrysanthi Unicode, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Bitstream Cyberbit, or Bitstream Vera):

I dont know what to suggest for this. This font behaviour has something to do with Wikipedia itself. I think this because if I save this page as HTML locally (i.e. it doesnt reference the style sheets or whatever it is doing), then the diacritic behaviour is fine without declaring any font-family. I think I have reached the end of my knowledge about this, so someone please help. peace — ishwar  (SPEAK) 18:18, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)

Here is the code for a quick test. Save as .html.

 <html>
  <head> test </head>
  <body>
  this is a test <br><br>
  <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" style="text-align: center"><br>
  <caption><b>no font specification</b></caption><br>
  <tr><br>
  <td>  i • ĩ • u • ũ • ẽ • o • õ  </td><br>
  </tr><br>
  <tr><br>
  <td>ə • ə̃ • ɛ • ɛ̃ • a • ã</td><br>
  </tr><br>
  </table>
  </body>
  </html>

— ishwar  (SPEAK) 19:57, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)

Different for me: On Safari 2.0 (OS X 10.4.1), everything displays all right except for the samples lacking font specification, no matter whether on the seperate file or on wikipedia. On Firefox 1.0.4, everything is okay, it is only annoying that i+'combining tilde' really is i+'combining tilde' and not ı with tilde above. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 01:47, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

hi. From what I tell now, the reason my setup (still Safari 1.3, OS 10.3.9) was not displaying the combining diacritics correctly has to be with the specification:

font-family: sans-serif

This declaration forces my version of Safari to use the Helvetica font, and it is this font which does not properly align the diacritics. (but Helvetica does align things correctly if I paste into TextEdit). If Safari uses another font, then this problem is resolved. Incidentally, if I disable Helvetica (through Font Book), then Safari used the Lucida Grande font which displays all diacritics correctly.

The font-family declaration is in Wikipedia's main.css file.

Anyway, maybe this just obvious to everyone else. If so, sorry. peace – ishwar  (speak) 03:38, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

[edit] No underlining for {{IPA}}

Underlining obscures certain IPA characters, particularly those with descenders that may distinguish them from similar characters, so I've added the style "text-decoration: none;" to the template. This works in IE but not Firefox. Did I do something wrong? Usually Firefox is pickier about the exact format, but I'm pretty sure I've followed this tutorial exactly. —Simetrical (talk) 4 July 2005 23:10 (UTC)

What you were doing seems fine, but why is text-decoration:none; necessary? The word is not a link, so it shouldn't be underlined in any case, right?

If you want to make it a link, and keep it from being underlined, that won't work without changing Wikipedia's style sheet. There's probably a declaration in the style sheet like a:link {text-decoration:underline;}, which would be more specific in scope than text-decoration:none; applied to the surrounding span. The less specific declaration embedded in the page can't override a more specific declaration. —Michael Z. 2005-07-5 04:13 Z

I thought that any specification made in the style attribute of a tag is considered more specific than a specification made in the style sheet? a:link refers to any chunk of text in <a> tags, after all, while the low-level declaration only that specific chunk of text. —Simetrical (talk) 7 July 2005 02:27 (UTC)

My current recommendation is to never make IPA characters a link. If you want to link to something, make a nearby word a link instead. Nohat 5 July 2005 05:45 (UTC)

That just isn't practical in many cases. Look at Hebrew alphabet#Numerical_value_and_pronunciation, for instance, over on the right (that really needs to be reworked to be much slimmer, incidentally). What should be done, making each entry a full wikilinked name like Glottal stop? Better to have the descenders obscured but allow anyone to figure out what it means by hovering over it or clicking, than fill the table with characters that will be totally incomprehensible to 95% of viewers. —Simetrical (talk) 7 July 2005 02:27 (UTC)

Linking IPA text is not the magic cure to making IPA comprehensible to that 95% of viewers who don't understand it. That table is a huge mess and I'd say that the linked IPA does not add to the table's comprehensibility. IMHO, that table should summarize just the basic information for each letter, and the detailed information for each letter should be on each letter's page, which can spell out the name of the sounds represented. Nohat 7 July 2005 02:37 (UTC)

Possibly, but a single unified table is useful for quick reference. (I've actually split it into two now.) In any case, how does linking a confusing IPA symbol like x or j, or a completely incomprehensible one like ʔ, not aid comprehension if someone wants to know how yod or whatever is/was pronounced? —Simetrical (talk) 7 July 2005 03:18 (UTC)

I agree with Nohat. Linking this way won't really help those who don't know IPA and will only annoy those who do. And linking every single usage of the template is really not useful. You can use a separate template or just clever normal linkage for that.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:52, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Problem

The template is currently not displaying IPA at all. I do not know how to fix this --Vincej 12:55, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

It seems to be a problem with the code or something. Try to wait and see if it gets fixed before making edits.

Peter ^Isotalo 13:31, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

I have mentioned the problems to the developers on IRC. They are currently looking into it. Func( t, c, @, ) 13:45, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] This is annoying...

I'm using Firefox and noticed that where this template is used, the text is displayed in a font called Gentium on my computer. But if it is not used, IPA text is displayed in Arial Unicode MS (which I greatly prefer over any other). Anyway, I just thought I should say that it does affect the font display in other web browsers. On some pages, not all IPA text uses this tag, but some IPA text that were recently added do use this tag. So on pages with a mix of old and new IPA text with this tag, I end up with some IPA text on the same graph displayed in Arial Unicode MS and Gentium. It looks very messy so I had to remove Gentium from my fonts folder just so that all IPA text would appear in Arial Unicode MS. --Hecktor 21:09, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Very annoying; this is a brand-new behaviour affecting Safari too, and presumably all other browsers. It looks like Wikimedia has changed the way CSS comments are being rendered, and the second font declaration is now broken. Instead of

   font-family /**/:inherit;

The declaration which negates the fonts (for every browser except MSIE/Win) now renders with either a non-breaking space (in numeric entity format), or a regular space in place of the CSS comment:

    font-family  :inherit;

or

    font-family  :inherit;

It mixes up these two versions on a single page. I'll try to figure out what happened and fix it. —Michael Z. 2005-10-2 21:43 Z

I filed this as bug 3588 on Bugzilla. —Michael Z. 2005-10-2 22:16 Z

Just wanted to add that I'm using IE (on a university computer, so I get very little option), and I haven't been able to see IPA characters for a few days now. Very annoying!

I'll put the CSS for this template into the style sheet Wikipedia:monobook.css, and just leave class="IPA" in the template. This should work. I'll have to do this for Template:Unicode and Template:Polytonic, and any others too. In-page tables or divs that have this construction will have to be updated.

I'll do it sometime today, and report back here. Is someone able to update the documentation on this page, and for the other two templates I mentioned? —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 14:50 Z

• The template will add less page bloat—good.
• Users can style whole tables or divs by adding class="IPA"—good.
• Non-admin users won't be able to change the font list—good or bad, depending on your point of view.

Done. I'll summarize on the relevant talk pages. —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 15:23 Z

Thanks for that, it works fine for me now. Grinner 15:32, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Whew. I was just waiting for the bug reports, so I'm glad it works for someone. Thanks. —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 15:42 Z

[edit] Template size

With the long title text and many fonts in the declaration, this template is currently 471 characters long. This template swells the article on the International Phonetic Alphabet by over 219 kilobytes, tripling its size!

The title text should be pared down. Only fonts that are likely to be on a user's machine should be included; if you want another font represented, add a declaration to your own user style sheet instead of adding it here (see #Applying custom styles to IPA text on this page). —Michael Z. 2005-10-2 22:51 Z

[edit] Font declaration has been moved to Common.css

The way Template:IPA, Template:Unicode, and Template:Polytonic do their job has been changed. They should continue to work as before. Sorry if this causes any inconvenience. Problems? Click "refresh".

The font declarations for these three templates have been moved to the style sheet at MediaWiki:Common.css. This reduces the size of Wikipedia pages' code, by as much as 100kB in the case of IPA. The respective font declarations are applied to HTML entities with one of the following attributes (capitalization counts). The three templates in question have been updated, so they will continue working as before.

class="IPA"
class="Unicode"
class="polytonic"

The only disadvantage of the new scheme is that only admin users are able to edit the font declarations in Common.css (or is it an advantage?). But you can override the font declaration for yourself by editing your own Wikipedia user style sheet. See Template talk:IPA#Applying custom styles to IPA text. Alternatively, you can use a browser like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Safari, in which Unicode text just works.

The reason for this change is that the Mediawiki software no longer allows comments in inline style sheets, because Microsoft Internet Explorer's incorrect parsing is unsafe and can be used for cross-site scripting attacks. See Wikimedia bug no. 3588.

Similar font declarations applied to any tables or divs on Wikipedia should have one of the above-mentioned class attributes added instead.

The style sheet code in Common.css looks like this:

/* Support for Template:IPA, Template:Unicode and Template:Polytonic. The inherit declaration resets the font for all browsers except MSIE6.  The empty comment must remain. */
.IPA {
        font-family: Chrysanthi Unicode, Doulos SIL, Gentium, GentiumAlt, Code2000, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Bitstream Cyberbit, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro, Matrix Unicode;
        font-family /**/:inherit;
}
.Unicode {
        font-family: TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Code2000, Doulos SIL, Chrysanthi Unicode, Bitstream Cyberbit, Bitstream CyberBase, Bitstream Vera, Thryomanes, Gentium, GentiumAlt, Visual Geez Unicode, Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS, Microsoft Sans Serif, Lucida Sans Unicode;
        font-family /**/:inherit;
}
.polytonic {
        font-family: Athena, Gentium, Palatino Linotype, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, Code2000; 
        font-family /**/:inherit;
}

Please discuss this at Template talk:IPA#Font declaration has been moved to Common.css. —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 15:39 Z

[edit] Discussion

css is certainly the right way to handle this sort of thing. However, not everyone uses monobook -- there are 7 other styles available in Special:Preferences. Since I can't edit the css files, I am fixing this temporarily by reverting to the old system. Please revert back after all the other css files are updated. And then, please test on a variety of configurations. Thanks. --Macrakis 18:54, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

What's the name of the skin you are using? Do you know the location of its style sheet, and the other six? I'm glad to make the same changes to all of them. —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 19:03 Z

I use Classic, myself. Special:Preferences also shows MySkin, Cologne Blue, MonoBook, Nostalgia, Simple, Amethyst, and Chick. When you're done, you can also change back Template:Polytonic. --Macrakis 19:12, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I couldn't find any of those style sheets, but I've moved the offending code to MediaWiki:Common.css, so it should work in all skins. Please refresh and confirm that it's working for you. Thanks. —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 20:39 Z

No, it will not work in all skins. If there are 6 of them, and the inclusion of Common.css is done only in 5 of them (it's not automatic; it has to be done by hand on each of the skins, since there's no support for it in the software), one of the skins is not working correctly. Someone should find out which page on the MediaWiki: namespace the missing skin is calling and create it, copying from one of the other skins (for instance, MediaWiki:Cologneblue.css). --cesarb 21:06, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Never mind, I've done it myself (there were two skins which didn't have the Common.css include). I have not tested them, but it should work. --cesarb 21:17, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Tahoma for polytonic?

Compare:

• ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι
• ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι

The second one looks more like monobooks sans-serif font (defaults to Arial for western text, at least in IE and Firefox), doesn't it? Is there a specific reason Tahoma isn't in the list (and more importantly, before P.L.)? Are there important characters Tahoma doesn't support? Shinobu 02:10, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Mac and IE

The template does not work with Macintosh and IE

System Software Overview:

 System Version:   Mac OS X 10.3.9 (7W98)
 Kernel Version:        Darwin 7.9.0

        Explorer Version: 5.2.3 (5815.1)
              Encryption: 128 Bit
              User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.23; Mac_PowerPC)
            Machine Type: Unknown
          System Version: System 10.3.9
         TCP/IP Software: Open Transport - version 16.3.0
            Drag Manager: 68K & PPC Version
 Text Encoding Converter: Version 1.9.0
           System Memory: 2097,148K Bytes

Andreas 02:02, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[Replied at template talk:Polytonic#Mac and IE —Michael Z. 2005-12-28 06:02 Z]

[edit] CSS hackers needed

If any CSS hackers are in the house: Could you please have a look at Talk:Voiced_velar_plosive? It appears that Firefox preferably uses the font MS Reference Sans Serif for IPA letters, but the font is broken. Thanks, AxelBoldt 21:53, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Update: this is the same issue that Angr reported above for Netscape. AxelBoldt 22:34, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Interwiki link to vi:

Please add an interwiki link to the Vietnamese version of this template:

<noinclude>[[vi:Tiêu bản:IPA]]</noinclude>

Thanks.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 22:32, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Done. --CBDunkerson 17:07, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ͈͈͈͈͈ ͈ ͈

Hi there, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I was wondering if you can shed some light on this. At Korean language, there is this use of the template, <͈>, which does not render correctly on my browser (Firefox 1.5). Is it something you could fix perhaps? Cheers. PizzaMargherita 22:25, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

The character in question is combining diacritical mark, code point 0348, its appearance and usage are described at Korean language. Since you use Firefox, {{IPA}} does not affect your display. (It affect only MSIE.) If it does not render correctly on your browser, that would indicate that you don't have a font that supports this code point. If it displayed correctly, it would modify the preceding character: two vertial lines would appear under the < (which may not be what the editor intended). --teb728 16:44, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Priority of fonts in CSS class

Could we place the fonts that do not handle diacritics placement lower in the CSS font priority? Fonts like Gentium or Chrysanthi Unicode do not have diacritics placement, so diacritics will not always be well placed, some centered, others not. Also could we put those that do and are hinted with a higer priority? Here's a proposed order:

1. Doulos SIL - best IPA support: diacritics placement, stacking and decent hinting
2. Charis SIL - same as quality as Doulos SIL
3. DejaVu Sans - Sans Serif font with diacritics placement, some stacking and good hinting
4. Gentium - good IPA support except for no diacritics placement, no stacking, good hinting
5. Code2000 - good IPA support, diacritics placement, stacking but no hinting
6. Chrysanthi Unicode - good IPA support but no diacritics placement and no hinting
7. Others

---moyogo 06:47, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I am using MSIE 6.0 on WIN XP and unfortunately Charis SIL does not show IPA diacritics correctly. Jan.Kamenicek (talk) 23:59, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please remove Bitstream Vera Sans from font family!

Esteemed Powers That Be,

I am using Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. Normal text of Wikipedia gets displayed in Arial as specified, text in the IPA template gets displayed in Arial MS Unicode, which works perfectly (except for the bug with the tie bar, of course). Today I wanted to open a WordPerfect document and installed OpenOffice 2.0 for this purpose. Surprise! The most basic characters in IPA template now get displayed in a weird font with shading (each letter looks like a jpeg, sort of), and all other characters are rectangles! It turns out that in this template Bitstream Vera Sans has priority over Arial Unicode MS. Bitstream Vera Sans indeed looks like what Internet Explorer displays now, and it is devoid of special characters more "exotic" than Čč. It is not a Unicode font!!! It is even worse than plain Arial (which has, for example, basic Greek and Cyrillic)! Please remove it! *wince* *wail*

(The alternative, of course, would be that I and everyone else with both Windows and OpenOffice delete that font from their computers. Surely deleting it from the IPA template would make more sense.)

Yours truly

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:06 CEST | 2006/5/15

Addendum: These strangenesses do not happen with {{unicode}} and {{latinx}}. These templates do not have Bitstream Vera Sans, as shown in Template_talk:Polytonic. Accordingly, it's indeed Bitstream Vera Sans that is the culprit.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 02:01 CEST | 2006/5/17

Hello? Anybody here? Is this page on nobody's watchlist?

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:13 CEST | 2006/5/27

There is no font specification in this template.--MarSch 10:21, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually, yes there is (indirectly). class="IPA" triggers a stylesheet rule, which should be changed. Shinobu 20:27, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I removed Bitstream Vera from the .Unicode and .IPA classed. I wonder how it crept in there in the first place? —Ruud 00:50, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Here's how. --cesarb 04:17, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much!!!

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 16:32 CEST | 2006/7/17

[edit] Category

What exactly do we anticipate the category being used for? This is a meta-category and should properly be on the talk page, if a category is needed at all. But I would think what links here would be just as good. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:29, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Never mind, I think. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:59, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Māori version of the template made

mi:Template:IPA on the Māori wiki (mi), for use on mi:Takuu, an article I am developing, and on upcoming linguistics-related articles. I have made it a protected template. I can't add the interwiki here since I am not a sysop on en. Cheers Kahuroa 05:17, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bambara Wikipedia

Is this be needed for the Bambara Wikipedia? Guaka 00:41, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Linking, again

Hi, I propose a new template to link to articles using an IPA anchor. A preliminary version is available at {{User:Kjoonlee/tl}}. It uses the "nounderlines" class to stop underlines from being displayed.

Usage: {{User:Kjoonlee/tl|Target article|/aj pi ej/}}

• Works with slashes
  • /ŋ/
• And brackets
  • [ŋ]

You can see Elder Futhark to see why this might be needed. --Kjoonlee 07:13, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

But what should we call this template? Template:IPA2 is already taken and IPA3 isn't very easy to remember. Template:IPA link, perhaps?

Another reason this sort of template might be needed: Northern cities vowel shift can link to the vowels directly. --Kjoonlee 09:16, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Doh. Template isn't really needed, since class="IPA" is now sufficient to suppress underlines and {{IPA|[[Voiceless dental fricative|[θ]]]}} syntax does the job. --Kjoonlee 09:38, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Yet more linking: a proposal

I have an idea which I call "IPA Quickhelp templates" for making IPA symbols more comprehensible, like this: ʒ (try rolling over that with your mouse). That is, {{Ʒ}}. Currently it doesn't work with popups, I'm hoping to fix that. This is an improvement over the "linking" mentioned above for two reasons:

1. The tooltip text that it shows is a redirect with a non-jargon name, so the average person who doesn't know all the IPA symbols (I consider myself savvy and I know maybe half by sight) and who doesn't know what "fricative" means can figure it out by just holding the mouse over each symbol in turn.
2. The process of adding an alias is handled by a template and so requires much less typing and thought and linkchecking.

To discuss the concept, go here: template talk:Ʒ.--Homunq 04:38, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Explorer 7

I have just downloaded the upgrades for Internet Explorer 7 (version 7.0.5730.11), and I am sorry to say that the template {{IPA}} does not work well with it -- from what I can see, many diacritic modifiers to main IPA symbols show up as little square boxes, despite the use of the template (for an example, look at the dental affricate in the phoneme chart of the Wari' language). With the previous version of Internet Explorer everything went fine. Is there someone with the necessary template-making expertise who could fix this problem? --Smeira 12:10, 16 December 2006 (UTC) [Copied from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Phonetics by  Andreas  ^(T) 13:26, 16 December 2006 (UTC)]

[edit] pl interwiki

Let someone add polish interwiki - pl:Szablon:IPA Dodecki 14:38, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interwiki links

Could interwiki links for these languages be added? Thank you. :) --Kjoonlee 03:08, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Done. If you have any questions, please contact me at my talk page. Ian Manka 03:44, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] IPA/font problem: Mozilla

Browsing Canadian Gaelic, I find that the IPA sequences are illegible. The main problem seems to be the '&thinsp;' entities, which are appearing as the letters "THSP" in a box, as in the image on the right (a screengrab of my browser's attempt to render the first example in 'Phonology'). The associated text is:

 {{IPA|/ ʟ /}}

I'm using Mozilla 1.7.2 ("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803"); I'm not sure how to find out what font it is picking up. Hv 15:27, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki does not know about  ; you will have to use the corresponding numeric entity. --cesarb 17:08, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, but I'm not sure what that means: why should MediaWiki need to know about it? And is that a collective you, as in: nobody should be using   in any WP pages? If so, I hope there is a bot fixing things up, because it doesn't sound like fun to do by hand. Hv 10:15, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki uses a whitelist approach. This means that only entities it knows about will work. You can also request at bugzilla that thinsp be added to the list. --cesarb 10:56, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] lang attribute

There should be some lang attribute added to this, such as lang="x-IPA", to signify that the text is not in standard English. —155.33.61.98 06:20, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Is this documented somewhere? That is, what is the correct value for lang here? CMummert · talk 14:46, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

RFC 1766 would appear to be the relevant document. Any code starting 'x-' can be used safely, it seems; if there is a code for IPA, it would be one of the 'Codes of 3 to 8 letters may be registered with the IANA by anyone who feels a need for it', and I'm not sure if any of those codes have been registered. (Google doesn't seem to help tracking down the relevant information; references to the RFC are easy enough to find, but none of them mention the actual list of registered 3+-letter codes.) --ais523 17:44, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

If these pages are right, the correct syntax would be lang="en-fonipa". [5] [6] Does that look right to you? CMummert · talk 18:13, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

I've found the official IANA page on that linked from the websites you mention: [7]. Searching for 'IPA' indeed reveals that '-fonipa' is a suffix that identifies IPA used as the script. On the other hand, 'en' before the hyphen implies that it's the pronunciation of English, whereas it might be the pronunciation of some other language in the tag. So either we give IPA a parameter for the main language code, or we're stuck without the -fonipa designation. (I'm temporarily removing {{editprotected}} until it's decided what we want to do here.) --ais523 18:25, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this. I would be glad to make the protected edit, but it's not obvious to me what the right thing is. I'm going to post a pointer to this on WP:VP/T to get more eyes on it. CMummert · talk 18:41, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

In the meantime, I thought of lang="{{{2|en}}}-fonipa" as a possible solution, but I agree that this needs more input first. --ais523 18:43, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edit request

It would be great to have the Template:IPA article placed into Category:IPA so that editors would be more aware of its existence. Or would placing this talk page in the category be an acceptable alternative? --Blainster 20:20, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

{{editprotected}} . That seems to be a category of articles; I don't think we should put a template in there, because of Wikipedia:Self reference. CMummert · talk 17:24, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Identifying IPA use

Not too long ago, most people putting IPA pronunciation into an article usually preceded it with a wikilink (IPA) to the IPA article to explain what it was. Now many of them use this template instead, perhaps thinking it might provide such a link, which it doesn't. I would like to see a link included in the template, if it would not make excessive work looking for instances in which the link was already separately provided. --Blainster 17:27, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

It seems there is an alternate template, {{IPA2}} available, which does include the IPA wikilink I suggested. --Blainster 16:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish

Could you please link sv:Mall:IPA? Thanks, – SmiddleTC@ 17:50, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

{{editprotected}}

--Kjoonlee 17:57, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Done. Cheers. --MZMcBride 18:07, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why use this template at all?

In most cases where this template is used, it is counterproductive. I'm not only talking about the many display issues others mentioned above. But let's take a look at what it actually does: Its main function is displaying a tool tip saying "Pronunciation in IPA". Now let's look at the different cases when it is used, and if it makes sense.

• Pronounciation explanations of article titles, such as geoduck. For these, we have already {{IPA2}} and {{IPA3}}, which provide a standardized way of referring to the pronunciation.
• Tables, such as {{Consonants}}. In such cases, it is absurd to use this template. All it does is it prevents the tooltip from displaying the actual name of phone - which is automatically provided by the name of the linked article. (Compare the old version with the one without this template.) Moreover, by using {{IPA2}} in a table like {{Consonants}}, we introduce dozens of second-level transclusions into many dozens of pages. It's an absurd waste of bandwidth!

Can anybody point to a really useful application of this template? If not then I'd propose to delete it. — Sebastian 05:52, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

This template is necessary because Microsoft Internet Explorer is stupid about displaying fonts in mixed Unicode ranges. Without this template, most Unicode characters won't show up in that browser. Before its introduction, there were constant revert wars over pronunciation guides and IPA.

It does screw up the tool-tip on links, but IPA text should not normally be linked (per Wikipedia:Pronunciation#IPA style), because underlines in browsers make some IPA unreadable. If you must link IPA text, try using <span class="IPA">, or some other HTML element with the attribute.

Tables with a lot of IPA should have class="IPA" added to the table attributes, instead of using multiple instances of template:IPA.

Template transclusions have been discussed elsewhere. They definitely don't require any bandwidth—although the code they insert may increase page size—and the consensus seems to be that they are not taxing on the Wikimedia servers. It's been a while since I've read any of the relevant discussion, but you may find more info at Wikipedia:Transclusion costs and benefits. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2007-06-19 06:51 Z

Thank you for your good comments; especially the one about using <span class="IPA"> was very helpful. That settles the matter for the big tables. I overlooked that the class property was part of the template, too. I now see that the template has some use.

However, I still don't see a use for the tool tip in this template. It comes at a cost, and I think the benefit is less than that of other templates. The template is used for two different cases:

1. Where we want to ensure IPA displays correctly. This is for cases where it is already clear to the reader that the text is IPA.
2. Where we want the above and alert readers that this is an IPA text.

I feel #1 would be better served with a simple template that only contains the class property. (I just created such a template as {{IPA0}}.) #2 would be better served with {{IPA2}} or {{IPA3}}. I therefore propose to phase out {{IPA}} and replace all occurrences with one of the three numbered templates. — Sebastian 21:30, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

We need it because Template:IPA is used for both screen output and print output. Observe:

Polemics (pronounced [pʰəˈlɛmɪks, pʰoʊ-]) [...]

We need custom anchors, so we can't use IPA2 or IPA3 in all cases. Sometimes you want to use square brackets instead of slashes as well. It's also nice to provide a visual cue on the IPA transcription itself, because that's where people would most likely point to first when they see something they don't recognize. --Kjoonlee 10:55, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

There's one think I don't understand, though. Look, Template:IPA doesn't interfere with link titles. [ʃ] --Kjoonlee 11:00, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your patient explanation, and for fixing my oversight on IPA0. I now see that there are legitimate uses for this template, so the question of this section "Why use this template at all?" has been answered.

I still think most of the articles that use this template would be better served with one of the numbered IPA templates, and we need to think about how to standardize the pronunciation hints in our articles, but that would be the topic of another discussion.

To answer your question about the link: There are two ways to combine the template with a link - inside or outside. When used inside, as was the case in the consonants template, it appears like this: [ʃ]. — Sebastian 15:34, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] custom anchors for links

The following was a reply to Sebastian's message of 15:34, 20 June 2007 (UTC); this headline was inserted after the reply.

There's still the problem with custom anchors for links. Sometimes you might want to link to different articles for different languages. You can't use custom link text (anchors) with the numbered templates, which is something you haven't addressed yet. There's also the problem between phonetic [] and phonemic // transcription, which both need to be available as choices. The IPA2 and IPA2 use only one variant each. As for combining the IPA with links,

<span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA"><a href="/wiki/%C6%A9" title="Ʃ">[ʃ]</a></span>
<a href="/wiki/%C6%A9" title="Ʃ"><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">[ʃ]</span></a>

I think the former (from [ʃ]) results in more elegant code. --Kjoonlee 17:14, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, it's much more elegant. As I wrote on User talk:Denelson83#IPA template transclusion, it was a smart idea.

I'm not sure what your point is about custom anchors. Are you trying to convince me of the usefulness of the IPA template? That would be beating a dead horse, since I already agreed that there are some legitimate uses. Or are you stating this as a related problem that needs to be discussed? (As a compromise between both possibilities I inserted the above headline only as level 3. Please adjust as needed.) — Sebastian 19:21, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm trying to say that you can't just switch from IPA to IPA2 or IPA3, because of custom anchors and slashes/square brackets. You still said most articles would be "better served with one of the numbered IPA templates". --Kjoonlee 19:29, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I did. And right in the next sentence, I specified: "We need to think about how to standardize the pronunciation hints in our articles, but that would be the topic of another discussion." It is beyond me how you can read "just switch" into this. By "standardize" I meant precisely the fact that we have many different ways providing pronunciation hints, including slashes (e.g. in Arizona and Aeschylus), brackets (Aberystwyth) or neither (Isaac Albéniz), not to speak of the many cases which use other templates or even pseudo-English pronunciations (Kulam, Qi), which are much harder to find. Bringing some order in this chaos obviously is more than "just switching", but it is worthwhile since these pronunciation hints are usually the first thing readers see in an article. However, I don't think that this template talk page is the right place to discuss this. — Sebastian 02:33, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

But we can't standardize on what editors think should be written: phonetic or phonemic transcription. We can't just all think alike in every case.... --Kjoonlee 04:37, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Updates

Hi, we don't have font names in the template anymore. I've updated bits of the talk page, and I would appreciate some help with this page and Template:IPA/doc. Thank you. :) --Kjoonlee 16:50, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of fonts

font-family: "Chrysanthi Unicode", "Doulos SIL", Gentium, GentiumAlt, 
Code2000, "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", "DejaVu Sans", "Bitstream Cyberbit", 
"Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro", 
"Matrix Unicode";

Hi, the above is what MediaWiki:Monobook.css has, more or less.

I think we should propose a change. Charis SIL ought to be added, and readily available fonts should be moved to the front. Matrix Unicode isn't easily available, so it might as well be deleted.

font-family: "Doulos SIL", "Charis SIL", Gentium, GentiumAlt,
"DejaVu Sans", Code2000, "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", "Bitstream Cyberbit",
"Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro",
"Chrysanthi Unicode";

How does this look? --Kjoonlee 17:51, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Don't know about each specific font, but in principle better fonts should appear earlier in the list, and readily-available ones should be further back as fallback choices. —Michael Z. 2007-08-20 21:20 Z —The preceding signed but undated comment was added at 21:20, August 20, 2007 (UTC).

• Doulos SIL, Charis SIL, Gentium, and DejaVu Sans are top-notch. Doulos SIL and Charis SIL are good all-round fonts. Gentium could have the positioning of the combining diacritic marks improved somewhat, and it lacks some stand-alone tone marks, but it's pretty comprehensive. (And we don't use stand-alone tone marks much at Wikipedia.) DejaVu Sans has weak positioning also, but it has very nice coverage. It's sans-serif as well. These are all readily available for download.
• I don't have enough experience with the others to comment about their merits. I know I dislike TITUS Cyberbit Basic's stress marks.
• Code2000 can be downloaded easily —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kjoonlee (talk • contribs) 19:46, August 21, 2007 (UTC).
• Arial Unicode MS comes with some versions of MS Office
• Lucida Sans Unicode comes with Windows XP
• Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro is for Mac OS X, but I don't know much about it
• Chrysanthi Unicode I've never used. --Kjoonlee 19:45, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Any comments?

font-family: "Doulos SIL", "Charis SIL", Gentium, "DejaVu Sans",
Code2000, "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", "Arial Unicode MS",
"Lucida Sans Unicode", "Chrysanthi Unicode";

I can't imagine someone having GentiumAlt without Gentium, so removed GentiumAlt. Bitstream Cyberbit isn't freely available anymore, so it was removed also. Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro is for Mac OS, so I doubt MSIE users (who are the only people who need this font list) will have it handy. If no suggestions are made, I'm going to request an update of MediaWiki:Monobook.css. --Kjoonlee 20:36, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

So, is that done? --Koryakov Yuri (talk) 09:59, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

It wasn't, but I've just put up the request for change. --Kjoonlee 21:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Charis SIL should come before Doulos SIL. They cover the same range, & have the same OTF properties, but Charis is more recent and better designed typographically. It's not great, but Doulos is pretty bad. When Gentium is finished, that should come first. kwami (talk) 19:22, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! Suggestions have now been made at MediaWiki talk:Common.css --Kjoonlee 21:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

And now they've been implemented. After deleting my cache, I can confirm Charis SIL works for me with IE6. --Kjoonlee 11:02, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Solution for IE6/7 problem

Usually, MS IE versions 6 and 7 cannot visualize the complementary IPA signs correctly. The solution would be adding the string "lang=en" to the template. See: http://www.ibloomstudios.com/articles/the_ie7_css_hack/ --TheMexican ^(talk) 14:24, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Doesn't work for me, with MSIE6.

• [ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z]
• [ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z]
• [ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z]

The first and third look the same in MSIE6, so there's no real need to add lang="en" in my case. --Kjoonlee 19:51, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, normal simple signs will appear always correctly if you have Arial Unicode MS or Lucida Sans Unicode font installed. But try to put an IPA sign with a complementary (joint) character, like the sign for "bilabial approximant", and it will show a "beta" with an empty square (just see the table in the IPA article, there should not be empty squares). We tried the same in the Hungarian Wikipedia and it works perfectly if you complete the template with the string I suggested. --TheMexican ^(talk) 20:28, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Let me see:

• β̞ hmm strange... here it really doesn't work as well. Then maybe you should change something else, too. See hu:Sablon:IPA. --TheMexican ^(talk) 20:54, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Look at also this test page, there is no squares: hu:User:El Mexicano/Teszt --TheMexican ^(talk) 21:01, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I see the reason now. The English Wikipedia uses:

.IPA { font-family: foo, bar, baz;
       font-family /**/:inherit; }

But the Hungarian Wikipedia uses:

.IPA { /* IE only ( http://www.ibloomstudios.com/articles/the_ie7_css_hack/ ) */
       font-family: foo, bar, baz; }
.IPA:lang(en) { font-family: inherit; }
.IPA:empty { /* Safari */
       font-family: inherit; )

--Kjoonlee 21:03, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Cool, so an admin should make these changes to the IPA class and there'll be no problem in IE either. :) Regards, --TheMexican ^(talk) 06:22, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

But it's a wrong hack. IPA can be used for all languages. The lang="en" attribute means that it's English. --Kjoonlee 09:13, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

It's the only reliable IE7 CSS hack though, and the lang attribute isn't used by anything. Usability should come before semantic correctness IMO. --Tgr 10:56, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

If usability was king, MS would fix IE7 right away so that Template:IPA would be obsolete. If the lang attribute isn't used at the moment, all the more reason to keep it safe for future use. --Kjoonlee 15:58, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Keep safe from what? You can remove it from the template any time if screen readers start to interpret IPA codes differently depending on the language (which is rather hard to imagine, given that the whole point of IPA is to contain all pronunciation information in the characters). --Tgr 21:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

That's a very bad approach. You are implying that we have tested this in every single screen reader on the planet, and know that none of them uses the language tag. Obviously that's impossible, so you are simply implying that we don't care that much about a few cripples and their weirdo assistive devices.

Of course you're not implying this, but coding this way would have the same effect. Wikipedia should be the last site on the web to use such practices. —Michael Z. 2007-10-03 04:53 Z

I'm not very familiar with IPA, but it should be language-independent, shouldn't it? If a screen reader transforms the IPA markup for an english and a french word differently, then that reader doesn't know what IPA is, and will get it wrong without the lang attribute too.

And it's not like there is some more sensible default the lang=en overwrites; in fact, the whole page is wrapped in a lang attribute determined by the interface language; thus if I set messages to french in my preferences, for me IPA texts will be lang=fr by default, wich is just as much incorrect. (And setting a language attribute for the whole document is a standard practice; if a defunct screen reader gets confused from that, it is pretty much useless for reading IPA anyway.)

If you want semantically correct pronunciation markup, the only way is to include it as a parameter in the IPA template, and set manually for every bit of text; but that's a lot of work for nothing.

--Tgr 08:02, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, you make some valid points there. IPA is language-neutral, so on the one hand, it should not cause any problems to redundantly specify lang=en for IPA text. On the other hand, I think it's silly to pepper the code with meaningless markup, (slightly) bloating the page, to work around a bug in one browser. I'd rather see this go in the browser-specific style sheet, so the rest of us don't have to worry about why the code is there, and don't have to have it loaded in our browsers. —Michael Z. 2007-10-03 08:33 Z

Or the .IPA rule could be moved from Common.css to the IE-specific stylesheets which are served in conditional comments, but I'm not sure all skins use them. --Tgr 11:09, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, please. It would be great to get these hacks out of the main style sheet. —Michael Z. 2007-10-03 04:53 Z

I've checked a few skins, no two use the same file for conditional comments, and most don't have one at all. Maybe it could be loaded from Common.js with browser detection and DOM scripting; that way, slowing page loading by reading in one more style file could also be avoided. --Tgr 08:02, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Something like this should work:

if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("MSIE") != -1 && document.createStyleSheet) {
   document.createStyleSheet().addRule('.IPA', 'font-family: foo, bar, baz;');
}

--Tgr 08:33, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, guys, whatever the solution is, while I'm seeing any empty squares in the IPA article even in my IE7 with all the unicode font sets and extra features installed, there must be something wrong. Of course we are here to help you solving the problem and not just for disturbing or forcing you to change something. Thank you for your understanding and positive collaboration. --TheMexican ^(talk) 17:57, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Anyone still here? Compared to the outcry over a few disabled people maybe not being able to listen to IPA markups, you are taking the fact that daily a million or so IE 7 users can't read them rather calmly :-) --Tgr 09:51, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

We shouldn't knowingly degrade the presentation of Wikipedia for people who have adopted accessibility technologies, not even for a single one of them. Some of these are people who have more difficulty with many everyday actions including reading, and they may have spent significant effort or money to adopt technologies that help ameliorate this disadvantage. Such degradation can also affect millions of other users of various handheld and other web minority browsers.

On the other hand, IE7 users have started with a broken browser which can't properly display multilingual web pages (and I am surprised that MS hasn't fixed what was a serious known problem in IE 6). Let's do what we can to overcome the limitations of their platform, without screwing it up for anyone else. If they care about reading every character in IPA, we can suggest they find a way to use the free Firefox or other browser.

That aside, I'm not crazy about implementing what looks like a complicated hack potentially affecting other mainstream browsers. Have the declarations .IPA:lang(en) and .IPA:empty been tested in other browsers and versions? It looks like this hack depends on a bug in Safari—is that bug present in versions 1.0, 2.0 and the Safari 3.03 beta? This could further break things unpredictably in all kinds of browsers.

Let's put the IE stuff into the conditional code. Since it will work in Monobook and most other skins, it will fix the display for practically all IE users. —Michael Z. 2007-10-08 21:58 Z

Yes, the code you suggested putting into my monobook.js, works perfectly. It should be put into the common configuration file. --TheMexican ^(talk) 21:28, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Should be in Common.js now. IE7 users with javascript turned off will still see boxes, but whatever. --Tgr 07:29, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I see boxes in IE7 with JavaScript enabled. Yecril (talk) 23:01, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Let's not throw unexplained acronyms at our readers

{{Editprotected}}
Please change the span title to "Pronunciation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" instead of "Pronunciation in IPA". — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 03:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually scratch that; let's change it to "Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" which is actually correct, and won't frustrate readers who think that if only they can try to click on the pop-up tooltip fast enough that they'll actually get to hear the pronunciation. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 03:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Y Done - Nihiltres^{t.l} 17:43, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] For symbols in non IPA transcriptions

Is there a template out there that also forces uncommon characters to display on Internet Explorer 6 or lower but without titling the tagged text "Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)"? For displaying characters other than in an IPA transcription (e.g. in a phonemic transcription such as /ṭūž/ ), where the "IPA" information would be misleading? Dan Pelleg (talk) 01:24, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Seems there's none, so I suppose I'll create one, if nobody minds. Dan Pelleg (talk) 22:01, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

{{IPA0}} and {{Unicode}} might work. kwami (talk) 19:16, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tie-bar

Using IE6, in the phonetic transcription of Wrocław (regardless of whether this template or IPAudio is used), I see a "u" with a grave accent instead of what is supposed to be a "t" with a tie-bar. Is there anything I can do about this? It's been suggested I should download DejaVu fonts, but I haven't managed to get anywhere by doing that. (In fact, as I remember, the display was slightly less inaccurate before I installed DejaVu Sans etc.)--Kotniski (talk) 10:39, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, the best workaround I can find is to put a Unicode no-width space between the "t" and the tie-bar. I'm going to do that in the Wrocław article, and if that doesn't generate any complaints, will do the same in other similar situations I come across.--Kotniski (talk) 17:43, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Idea: linking individual symbols

What do people think about this idea - making templates which produce IPA representations where each individual symbol is linked to a relevant article or help-page section? Likely to be of any use? I thought it might be useful for non-specialist readers who want to find quickly what a particular symbol means; and having templates which do the linking automatically will make it easier for editors who do this sort of thing often.

To illustrate what I mean, see the templates I've constructed for Polish: {{IPA-pl}} and {{Audio-IPA-pl}}. (The links currently go to subsections of Help:IPA, but most of them could be directed to individual articles on sounds instead.)--Kotniski (talk) 10:32, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Could be a good idea, but quite labor intensive. I'm not sure it would be implemented well. kwami (talk) 19:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)