IPA in Pages

Question

IPA in Pages

To the Apple Community,

I am using Pages for an IPA assignment and my professor has mandated that we use the Gentium Plus font so that all symbols are uniform for his grader, a policy that is thoroughly understandable from my point of view. I have encountered the need to utilize the upside down r /ɹ/ with a combining dot below so that is reads as this: /ɹ̩/ The process works fine in this text box, for some reason, in Microsoft Word, and even in TextEdit! Unfortunately, when I attach it to any character in pages it is wildly off-center, so much so that it looks like it is on the wrong letter. I'm using Pages 2009, am as updated as possible, and have no idea as to what I should do. Thanks for your time and for any prospective solutions.

Regards,

Chris Catalina

Pages 2009-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.2), Mac Mini '11 No Disc Drive Model

Posted on Feb 2, 2012 6:02 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 2, 2012 6:18 PM in response to ChrisFrenchArabic

Have you tried applying it through the Special Characters feature in Pages?

Some of these accents are applied with zero space characters to get one character to sit over another and the typing order can make a difference.

Gentium Plus however is a Unicode font with a huge range of glyphs. Open it in Special Characters and see if the inverse r with the dot is a unique character on its own.

Out of curiosity what is it used for?

Peter

PS A work around if Pages persists in stuffing it up is save it as a pdf and insert into Pages as an inline object with whatever baseline shift is necessary to align it with the text.

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Answer 2

Feb 2, 2012 6:33 PM in response to ChrisFrenchArabic

Are you using the otf version of Gentium plus?

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Gentium_download#02b 091ae

Gentium Plus 1.508 font developer release - SIL PUA 6.0a (Windows, Macintosh and Linux)

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Answer 3

Feb 2, 2012 6:48 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

I have used both my special keyboard layout that uses deadkeys to assign various symbols to the keyboard and the Special Characters menu to no avail. I tried several different locations (I placed the combining mark on the letter, on the preceding letter, on the following letter, etc.) and it never worked out, unfortunately.

I'm using the .ttf that came in the zip file in the normal 1.508 "Gentium Plus" download. Does the otf vs. ttf matter?

Also, this symbol /ɹ̩ / refers to the vowel sound found in the English word <bird> as pronounced throughout the US (terminal <-er> sounds, like <computer>, <mower>, etc. are good examples.) A pretty important phoneme for American English!

Thanks for your help.

-Chris

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Answer 4

Feb 2, 2012 6:53 PM in response to ChrisFrenchArabic

If you read the Gentium Info it says has good support for OpenType which I suspect would be improved spacing tables over those of the older TrueType.

Peter

ps American English can use all the help it can get. 😀

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Answer 5

Feb 2, 2012 7:03 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

Hmmm... it's troubling to me that it works fine in TextEdit, Word, but not Pages, though...

You're right about Am. English, especially as pertains to the Californian lack of vowels. There are practically more in Arabic (linguistics geek joke... Arabic has 6 vowels and British "standard" has 18-20. I think Californian has 13-15. Ambiguity much?)

Thanks for the help from the (sort of) antipodinal side of the planet.

-Chris

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Answer 6

Feb 2, 2012 7:13 PM in response to ChrisFrenchArabic

You should try New Zealand English. Basically one vowel approximating the letter e with subtle variations.

The spacing problem may be akin to the issues Pages has with ATSUI and that affect Arabic, Hebrew etc.

TextEdit seems to be fine there as well.

Peter

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Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,228 points

Feb 3, 2012 7:07 AM in response to ChrisFrenchArabic

ChrisFrenchArabic wrote:

Hmmm... it's troubling to me that it works fine in TextEdit, Word, but not Pages, though...

Yes, Pages text engine is not the same and has problems with some things as mentioned by Peter. The only fix is to use a different font for that particular character. Lucida Grande should normally work. Gentium Basic works for me too.

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Answer 8

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,228 points

Feb 3, 2012 8:34 AM in response to ChrisFrenchArabic

PS What you posted here in the forum did not have a combining dot below, but a combining vertical line below. Same problem however...

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Answer 9

Feb 3, 2012 9:10 AM in response to ChrisFrenchArabic

As an old user of various diacritical marks in various contexts, I may say Pages is below TextEdit at this chapter, unfortunately. For such activitites I recommend Nisus and, with opentype fonts, Mellel. As they are usable as shareware for 30 days, download and check for yourself. iCalamus also beautiofully handles combinet diacriticals.

More theory on this within may keyboard layouts US Academic (linguistic and dialecal use, a little bit obsolte, do not include late additions, must find time to update it), Etruscan and various other keylayouts at

http://www.unibuc.ro/e/prof/paliga_v_s/soft-reso/

enjoy

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Answer 10

Feb 3, 2012 9:45 AM in response to Cattus Thraex

P.S. this is, perhaps, the worst thing in Pages, and the main detail, which impedes me to make it my default word processor. For linguistic and dialectal studies, dealing with combined diacriticals is crucial. This is indeed a pity. If Pages had this feature, with its limited DTP capabilitites, it would become a blow to many other word processors.

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