From: Charlie Ruland ☘ (ruland@luckymail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2010 - 12:13:45 CST
FYI, I’m forwarding a message I received from Luciano Canepari on Tue,
23 Mar 2010 02:37:12 +0100.
Best,
Charlie ☘
— — — Luciano Canepari wrote: — — —
>Dear Mr Ruland,
>thanks for your e-mail. I appreciate your interest in my system of
>phonetic notation, and I am very happy that a proposal for its
>inclusion into the Unicode corpus has been made. Some points must be
>made clear, nonetheless, in order to fully understand how canIPA
>works.
>The system in itself started as a moderately extended version of the
>official IPA set, but as soon as digital typography became a reality
>available to everyone, I realized that there was no point in dealing
>with loads of diacritics, while unitary glyphs were far more
>appropriate and readable. The system possesses several hundreds of
>symbols nowadays, but it's hard to determine the exact number, since
>some composite symbols have been used just a few times, if not
>merely once, for very specific needs.
>As it is used in my books, the canIPA is primarily encoded in the
>Mac OS Roman charset; since this allows no more than 221 characters
>(with some further non-typographical ones), during the years I
>developed a peculiar modus operandi: besides a number of fonts for
>general purposes, I create(d) a unique Roman font for each language
>treated in depth, so that I have all the symbols I need at hand, and
>only those. This strategy proved most effective in combination with
>the classical QZERTY Italian (non-Pro) Keyboard Layout, with which
>the typist never resort to the Insert Symbol function, because all
>the glyphs can be input(ted) via keystrokes.
>Nevertheless, in the last years, my alumni insisted in adapting the
>system to the Unicode standard, and developed a series of
>Unicode-based fonts. The last one, called Sophonetica, can be
>regarded as quite complete, at least for most purposes. Obviously,
>it would be possible to reduce the total amount of symbols encoded,
>provided all the remnant composite glyphs can be obtained by
>combining fundamental characters with diacritics. Still, as this is
>the core of the canIPA philosophy, it is preferable to treat each
>and one glyph as an independent representation of a single phone,
>and therefore to encode it as it is, a unitary character.
>I personally do not use Sophonetica, but I do recognize it as a
>viable alternative for those who intend to employ the canIPA but do
>not (want to) adopt the Mac OS Roman charset, or do not use Apple
>computers altogether. If this is fine for you, I think the best
>thing to do is getting you in touch with a couple friends of mine
>who are familiar with both OS Roman fonts and Unicode, so that you
>can evaluate how to proceed.
>
>Best regards,
Luciano Canepari
-- LuCa Perhaps you may want to visit my website (http://venus.unive.it/canipa/)... -- 孔曰 書不盡言 言不盡意 Confucius said: Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.
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