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SILIPA93 Fonts - These are desperately outdated, but occasionally necessary when reading other people’s old IPA.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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Phonetics and Phonology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.