As a linguist, you find yourself using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) incredibly frequently. Some of the characters are easy enough to use without any special work (ŋ, ə). However, to get the more cool/obscure characters and diacritics, or to stack diacritics (placing, for instance, a tone marking above a nasal marking), you need special fonts, layouts and setup. In this post, I’m going to explain, as simply as possible, how to go about finding the files and setting this up, all without paying a dime for specialty software.
Getting the fonts and layout
The beauty of this method is that it uses software built into Mac OS X, and that you can use IPA fonts in any application that supports Unicode (translation: lots of them), not just specific programs. You also don’t need to install a separate program to clutter up your computer, just a few free fonts and a keyboard layout. So, here’s your freeware shopping list:
Necessary files:
1. Charis SIL IPA Font - The best free IPA font out there (in my opinion) because it has bold, italic, and all sorts of other characters outside of IPA. The download link is around halfway down the page, grab the file with “(Windows, Macintosh and Linux)” next to it. Thanks to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, it’s completely free!
2. The IPA-SIL Keyboard Layout for OS X - The only IPA Keyboard out there for OS X. It’s truly a wonderful thing, and completely free, thanks again to SIL. It says that it’s specific to Doulos SIL, but that’s a blatant lie, as I use it all the time with Charis. (I’d recommend the Version 0.6 Alpha on that page, not the more recent one. Although the more recent one works, it’s just a bit more complex. The instructions here are for the older, alpha version.)
Optional Files
Doulos SIL - A differently styled IPA font from SIL, missing the bold and italic forms that Charis has. Still free :)
SILIPA93 Fonts - These are desperately outdated, but occasionally necessary when reading other people’s old IPA.
Download at least the CharisSIL and the Keyboard layout, save them to your desktop (or a location of your choosing), and then proceed to the next step.
Power User’s Summary: Download CharisSIL and IPA-SIL keyboard Layout from the above links
Installing the font
Now, double-click the CharisSIL(version).zip file that you saved to your desktop. It’ll unzip into a similarly named folder on your desktop. Take the CharisSILfontdocumentation.pdf file and move it to a safe place, it’s a handy guide to have around, and feel free to take a look at the readme and license files in the folder.
Now, if you want to install this font for yourself and every other user on your computer, place the four font files from the folder (CharisSILB.ttf, CharisSILBI.ttf, CharisSILI.ttf, CharisSILR.ttf) along with any other fonts you’re installing into the /Library/Fonts folder. You’ll need to give an administrator password to install them into that folder.
To install for yourself alone, do the same as above, except by copying things into /Users/yourname/Library/Fonts. No admin access needed for this route.
Power User’s Summary: Install the font files in either /Library/Fonts or /Users/you/Library/Fonts
Installing the layout
Double click “IPA-SIL keyboard(version).dmg” on your desktop. Now click the newly opened “IPA-SIL Keyboard” Disk Image on the desktop and examine the contents.
The very first step is to save IPA-SIL.pdf! In fact, frame it. Wallpaper your wall with copies of it. Get a version tattooed on your chest. Just make sure you have it. Without this, you’ll have trouble figuring out exactly which keypresses result in which characters, and this method won’t work very well at all.
Now, drag BOTH IPA-SIL.icns and IPA-SIL.keylayout into either /Library/Keyboard Layouts or /Users/yourname/Library/Keyboard Layouts. As before, you’ll need Admin access to install in /Library/Keyboard Layouts. Also, you might have to create the …/yourname/Library/Keyboard Layouts folder if you’re installing for yourself only.
Once you’ve placed the files in the right folder, restart your computer.
Power User’s Summary: Save IPA-SIL.pdf. Drag BOTH IPA-SIL.icns and IPA-SIL.keylayout into either /Library/Keyboard Layouts or /Users/you/Library/Keyboard Layouts. Restart.
Final Configuration
Once you’ve restarted, go to the System Preferences Application. Click the ‘International’ preference pane, then, click the “Input Menu” tab inside the International Pane, and you’ll be presented with a window like this:
In this window, make sure and select “Keyboard Viewer” (to see what symbols are where at a glance), “Allow a different input source for each document”, and “Show input menu in menu bar”. Also, feel free to change the shortcut to switch input methods to make things faster for you down the road.
Now, use the scroll bar to scroll through the list of options until you finally see “IPA-SIL”, and select it. It’s right below the Eskimo languages. See below:
Now that you’ve done that, you should have a little American flag (which regrettably cannot be changed, even if you’re using a US keyboard outside of the US) in your menu bar. Congratulations! You’re now set up to use the IPA on your mac.
hɛloʊ wɜɹld!
To test it out, fire up any text editor (TextEdit, NeoOffice, MS Word, or my personal favorite, Mellel) and open a document. Be very sure to select Charis SIL for your font in the document.
Now, click the little menu in the menubar and select IPA-SIL:
Start typing and you’ll find yourself typing IPA symbols! You’ll slowly learn the reasonably intuitive set of keypresses (e.g: Shift+N = Angma, Shift+R = Alveolar Tap), and soon, you’ll be typing in IPA nearly effortlessly in nearly any application. You can even IM your linguist friends in IPA if they have the font as well.
The best part? Thanks to these free and open source fonts and layouts, you’ll never need to write a Word macro again on OS X. oʊ, wəɾə wʌndɛrfl wɜɹld!
EDIT: I’ve heard that sometimes, Word doesn’t play nicely with this sort of input method. I’d highly recommend that if you have troubles, you try using TextEdit (built in), Mellel, or the free Office suite for OS X, NeoOffice.
At the very least, you should be able to copy/paste your IPA text into a word document, or hopefully even make the switch entirely to a better word processor. Although MS Word may be the most well known word processor, it’s far from being the best, and I highly encourage you to check out all the options.
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This is so fabulous . . . I have been looking for this explanation for two days! THANK YOU for the excellent site!!!! You are the bomb.
To the author of the this guide,
I’m still having trouble getting IPA-SIL to work. I was hoping you could help me.
I have Word v.x (v 10.1.4) for students and teachers
I have followed the the installation instructions carefully, however, with Word active I cannot select the IPA-SIL keylayount from the “american flag ” menu bar even with the Charis SIL font selected. It is present in the medu, but greyed-out and not selectable. Curiously, as soon as I select the Charis SIL font the compter automatically switches to Russian cyrillic layout option, again in the “american flag” menu bar.
From the character palette in the “american flag” menu bar, I can see a warning when Word is active. It reads: “The current application does not support this Unicode-only character.” From other programs such as text edit and safari, the IPS-SIL seleciton is not greyed out and is selectable from the “america flag” menu.
Thanks for any advice you might have.
Luke Adams
Thank you so much. I have been wanting the ipa on my mac for sometime now being a student and tutor of linguistics.
Hi! I constantly use IPA fonts to take notes of my local language back in Occitània, although I am not a linguist (I sell property). This page is extraodinarily helpful, so a massive thanks to you for taking the time to share with us. Amistats occitanas, Raidako
I am extremely excited to finally have found an IPA system that supposedly works, every thing has showed up after having followed your directions however I am still unable to type IPA symbols. Is there a step i missed or something else i need to do. Any more help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for sharing the info.
Thanks so much for this site!
My only problem is that I haven’t been able to find the “a” in cat.
It must be there. Where should I look?
Thanks!
Natasha, try Shift + Q for /æ/. :)
Mukasa, feel free to IM or email me for more help to get it set up.
hi, great site, and a lot of help in setting up the IPA fonts with the new Mac OSX 10.4. I had been putting it off, but have to get them up and working, and your site made it all clear.
Unfortunately, I am having the same problem as Luke - it just isn’t working in Word.
Hi! Thanks for the aimple and helpful directions. However. I’m expriencing the same problem as Luke and Andrea. When I opened the file IPA-SIL Keyboard for Mac OS, the file IPA Unicode 5.0c(V1.2) could not be opened as it was not supported by any application. Could you advise me on this please? Thanks.
[...] Mystic has a very good IPA character entry mechanism for MacOS only. Posted by joshua on Sunday, September 9, 2007, at 22:30, and filed [...]
I’ve done the whole setup, but have two issues:
1) I never saw the IPA-SIL.icns file in the layout download. There was only the IPA-SIL.keylayout file and the PDF file. I did drag the IPA-SIL.keylayout file to the right place, but got the impression there might have been some version update or something which eliminated the need for the other file. Did I miss something?
2) All I really want to do so far is not to type in IPA but to read it in Safari, because my linguistics instructor said that Lucida Sans Unicode needs to be installed. LSU is still not showing in my list of Safari fonts, so there must be something else I need to do to get it from the library/fonts place to Safari. If anyone can explain to a dummy like me about this….
Thanks!
Hey!
Thanks for the great write-up, but I as well am having the same issue as Chris ^
I have placed everything in the right spot, however I cannot type up in IPA no matter what I do, would that missing icns file have something to do with it? Is there anyway you could host the .dmg file you used to create this write up as there may have been a change since you downloaded it last?
The only keyboard layouts available for download were created August 20/2007 so I would suppose they did something different this time around.
Thanks.
I have the same issue as Chris (above): –missing icns file. Keyboard file installed, but no matter what, no IPA comes through. What do I do?
regards,
ds
Alright, a few questions for everybody having these troubles:
1) What program are you trying to use? MS word is known to have issues with IPA and these input methods, so you might want to try it in TextEdit, worst comes to worse, you’ll just have to copy-paste some IPA over
2) Once you’ve gone through these steps, is IPA-SIL an option in the International prefs, keyboard layouts menu? Can you get the little velar nasal (ŋ) to show up in the menubar?
Also, by the way, this still does work in Leopard, the newest version of OS X. I’m not sure what’s up with the missing .icns file, but it’s possible that it’s no longer required. Let me know the answers to the above questions, and maybe I’ll be able to help.
Thanks! Very awesome and everything works exactly as described. Appreciate the time you put into compiling this information.
Thanks, it is working just like you said, I also am running Leopard and it works fine in text edit. I cannot find the schwa symbol. I have typed every key with the shift down. Do you know what I am leaving out, surely there is a schwa. I am a voice teacher and the neutral vowel sound “uh” is very important to the method. Thanks
Dewin,
To get Schwa, try pressing Option + e, and then a space. That should work :)
Will
For me, it doesn’t work (Charis SIL, Leopard, TextEdit). But it would be hard to switch anyway, because I have a Swiss keyboard. I use PopChar instead (), which is also useful, if you don’t have to type long texts in IPA.
Works wonderfully with Pages (the iWorks word processor that I prefer for longer more complex documents). I did find the icns file, possibly because I followed your advice to download the older version. Thank you so much! I have had these fonts for ages, but have never figured out how to get the keyboard to work.
I have one question: is it possible to get the affricates ʧ and ʤ? I had to insert them using the Character Palette. Is there any key combination that will type them in directly?
What a time saver! Thank you!!
Thanks very much for providing this information. I followed your meticulous steps and downloaded NeoOffice (which Word users should not be scared of, it’s easy to use) and everything works fine.
(Can’t get the diacritics in the right place however. e.g. They always end up just after the phoneme, rather than underneath. But a minor problem!)
Thanks again.
I just wanted to say thank you for this guide. I am an undergrad linguistics major and being able to type the necessary IPA characters is SOO AMAZING!! thank you!
This is a WONDERFUL website and you are a WONDERFUL person for making it. Thank you so freaking much.
Marry me!
Seriously, thanks for this! I really appreciate it!
No more screwed up documents for important ling lectures for me, Sir!
Thank you so much! This is amazing. I’ve been looking for an IPA font that is compatible with Macs for a whole semester. I found this site just in time to finish my big project. Such a relief!