There was an older thread (IPA font/input, +3 years old) about perhaps getting some International Phonetic Alphabet support for at least the Academico font, but no search results on forums or the documentation after that.
Has any progress been made over this time?
Since it’s an open licence, how could I go helping out with this (making contributions to Academico), if resources have been scarce?
OG poster of the 3 year old request here: I would looooove if any progress on this could be made! I’ve honestly had to go back to my old system of adding it in Adobe Illustrator to avoid issues in rendering (so much for Dorico being the one-stop for standard notation needs - I feel like I might be going full time Illustrator at this point). It’s pretty disappointing/surprising that there is so much difficulty incorporating a set of symbols which have been in standard use for like 50?+ years in music/vocal pedagogy into a basic font, so I guess this has not been a priority… bummer. I guess I’ll wait for the next X-number of updates (if it’s worth it?) which will include more squiggly lines which still only move in 2 directions lol. Sorry for the grumps - been ahhh frustrating.
Here’s some resources I use (though I’m sure you’ve seen them) in case they are any help:
Yes. I understand that, but experience doesn’t bear it out. I’ve literally tried at least 6 over the last 3 years and didn’t keep tabs but they were all freely downloadable and generally worked in my word processing apps, soooo. It’d be great if it could be integrated.
Speaking of which: I’m now working on IPA character support for the Nepomuk text font. If anyone with “IPA needs” would be interested in trialling it, to see if it works for them, do shout out.
There are a LOT of IPA symbols (plus modifiers) in the Unicode spec, and it would be good to know which ones are (or aren’t) useful, particularly if it’s ‘just for singers’.
And indeed, if there’s anything that needs to be implemented specifically for use in notation software that isn’t catered for by other fonts, that would also be useful.
@RamblerL I really don’t understand what the problem is with using another font for lyrics. I just tried it with Gentium (which has the most beautiful IPA glyphs I’ve seen) and it looks fine. I tried the typeit.org input method (with hyphens) and it pastes into Dorico as normal.
IPA is just one of the many subsections of the vast Unicode standard, which is basically fully supported in Dorico. Whether you can type certain Unicode characters in Dorico depends mainly on the font (and maybe special additions your OS, like keyboard layouts).
IPA is not a part of music notation per se. Academico doesn’t contain IPA, nor, AFAIK, Chinese, Devanagari, Hebrew or Sumerian, although there are countless musicians who need those scripts. (Well, I’ve yet to encounter my first score featuring Cuneiform lyrics, but hey, it’s possible).
So, just like for most non-Latin scripts, if you need IPA, you look for a font that supports it. Gentium is a beautiful, linguistically inclined font. I can recommend it. And it’s free!
