Template:IPA fixes broken display of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) characters in MS Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. In other web browsers, it doesn't affect font display at all.

It also allows all registered Wikipedia users to specify styles for IPA text by editing their monobook.css style sheet.

An example, placing a phonetic rendering of the word characters in Template:IPA:

{{IPA|/ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z/}}

The result will be a span with a style attribute, like this:

 <span class="IPA" style="font-family: Lucida Grande, 

  Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; 

  font-family /**/:inherit;">/&#712;k&aelig;.&#633;&#601;k&#716;t&#601;(&#633;)z/</span>

Which appears in your browser as:

/ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z/

Without template:IPA:

/ˈkæ.ɹəkˌtə(ɹ)z/

[The last two should only look different if you are using Internet Explorer on Windows.]

Please place all IPA text into Template:IPA, even if it doesn't have any special IPA characters, like this: /aj pi ej/. This will allow users to format all examples of IPA text consistently, with their choice of fonts, colours, etc.

The class="IPA" attribute exists so that Wikipedia users can apply their own style sheets to text in Template:IPA. See #Applying custom styles to IPA text, below.

The first declaration font-family: Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; actually lives in a sub-template at Template:IPA fonts. It lists a series of fonts that are known to contain IPA characters.

The second style declaration font-family /**/:inherit; overrides the preceding font declaration, and tells the text in Template:IPA to use the default font inherited from its surroundings, in every browser except MSIE 6.0. The empty comment placed just in the right spot confuses MSIE 6 and prevents it from applying this declaration. This is a documented way of hiding CSS from MSIE 6. [1]

The font list is at Template:IPA fonts [edit]. Remember that Template:IPA is intended to display IPA characters. Criteria for selecting fonts:

• Full IPA character set.
• Normal and bold weights, for emphasis.
• Sans-serif, matching Wikipedia's default font.

Less important criteria:

• Having a wide range of other international characters.
• Having italics.

Do not surround font names with single quotes, because Wikipedia's software will escape them with backslashes. CSS recommends single quotes around font names with spaces, but doesn't require them.

About the fonts

Arial Unicode MS

• sans-serif
• regular only, but automatically generated bold & slanted works in Windows
• comes with MS Office for PC and Mac
• is not available for Linux through [2], but is available through distribution-specific methods (ie. YaST)
• places double combining modifiers too far to the left by 1 em

Code2000

• serif
• shareware font from James Kass

Doulos SIL

• serif
• free font from SIL
• regular only

Gentium

• serif
• free font from SIL
• regular and italic only

Lucida Grande

• sans-serif
• comes with Mac OS X
• regular and bold only

Lucida Sans Unicode

• sans-serif
• comes with Windows XP
• doesn't include some IPA characters
  • double combining inverted breve
  • [what others?]

You can apply your own custom styles using the .IPA class selector in your local style sheet. If you are a registered Wikipedia member, you can put custom styles into your monobook.css style sheet.

Try this: place the following text into User:XXX/monobook.css, where XXX is your username.

.IPA { color: green; }

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation)
• Wikipedia:Pronunciation guide
• Template:IPA notice - notice indicating that an article contains IPA
• Template:ConvertIPA - notice for editors, that an article contains SAMPA or or pseudo-English transcription needing conversion to IPA
• Template:Polytonic - font specification for Polytonic Greek
• Template:Unicode
• Category:Pages containing IPA

• Alan Wood’s Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

Just so people understand, this template forces its argument to appear in a <span> tag forcing the use of Unicode fonts. This ensures that users can see the IPA characters in Windows Internet Explorer, which otherwise doesn't display IPA characters for anonymous users. Nohat 18:21, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I'd say that matching the rest of the page and having bold characters is more important. A well-written browser will substitute characters from a different font if the specified font doesn't have those characters. Of course if the most common browser were well-written, we wouldn't need this template at all. However, we do need it, but we shouldn't degrade the appearance of pages for users whose browsers are well-written. Therefore, a an attractive, well-matched font with roman and bold characters should be the primary criteria. Code2000 is widely regarded as a font of last resort due to its ugliness (as well as its non-freeness) and doesn't match the rest of the pages because it's a serif font: sans-serif is specified for body text in Wikipedia's CSS. Nohat 07:04, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Are there any instances on Wikipedia where IPA is formatted in bold-face? I can't think of a situation where it would be desirable. —Michael Z. 16:17, 2005 Jan 9 (UTC)

It's used on several pages to highlight particular symbols in a transcription. See [3] Nohat 19:37, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Good example. I've updated the criteria, and took the liberty of moving discussion down here. —Michael Z. 01:17, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be useful to make a template that is just the desired CSS font arguments and use that template in table headers so you can avoid putting the IPA template in at every item in the table? I'm not sure how this would interact with Wiki table markup, but I think it would work.

Done, at Template:IPA fonts. It renders the following

 Template:IPA fonts

It's just the font list, so it can be used in a style attribute to specify font-family or font, or even (heaven forfend) in a <font> element. I've put it into template:IPA, so the font list for all IPA in Wikipedia can be edited in one place. —Michael Z. 01:59, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

Also, as you probably remember I made a separate Unicode template a while back. In that template we recently changed the order of the fonts. What is your logic for the order you're using? It would be good to put the logic here in the talk page. --Chinasaur 19:40, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The logic has been changing as users have edited this template. See the history, and the font list above, for some insight. If the activity settles down, maybe I'll write it out for this talk page. —Michael Z. 01:59, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

AxSkov, which IPA characters does Arial Unicode MS have that Lucida Sans Unicode does not? The reason I want to move Arial further down the list is that it has a bug in the way it displays double combining modifiers (which are used to represent some affricates). See Talk:International Phonetic Alphabet#Other symbols for the technical details and examples. —Michael Z. 21:56, 2005 Jan 8 (UTC)

After doing some testing, it appears to me that Lucida Sans Unicode doesn't include those characters anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter which MS font comes first in that regard. I've put Lucida Grande first, so Mac OS X users will see it correctly even if they happen to have the MS fonts. Lucida Grande doesn't have italics, but I think IPA would never be italicized anyway. —Michael Z. 22:22, 2005 Jan 8 (UTC)

I'd like to propose changing the way Template:IPA works, so that it only has an effect in MSIE 6 for Windows. This requires two changes:

1. Add a style sheet directive to Wikipedia's existing MSIE-only style sheet [4]:

.IPA { font-family: Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS,
       Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; }

2. Edit Template:IPA so that it applies the IPA class:

<span class="IPA"> [content] </span>

To specify IPA in a different scope (e.g., a table or a div), an editor can simply add class="IPA" as an HTML attribute. Multiple classes can be specified: class="toccolours IPA". Users can also use the .IPA selector to specify styles in their own user style sheets at User:XXX/monobook.css.

We'll need the co-operation of an admin or developer to change the style sheet.

Why?

• The font specification is only required for one browser: MSIE 6/Windows. It's a hack.
  • Other modern browsers automatically substitute fonts containing the characters (Mozilla, Firefox, Safari)
  • Some older browsers won't display IPA anyway (MSIE 5/Mac)
• The current method needlessly overrides the font display for other browsers, including user-selected fonts, and may break the display. It will override:
  • Web browser's default font
  • Web browser's automatic font substitution (e.g., if the default font doesn't have IPA characters
  • User's selected font in browser preferences
  • User's local style sheet
  • Wikipedian's fonts specified in User:XXX/monobook.css.
• Users might be tempted to use this for other Unicode character ranges, where it may may degrade display in other browsers (I've already seen it happen). If its application is restricted to a single Windows browser, then changes are less likely to do any damage.
• This solution allows registered Wikipedians to specify their own font for IPA in their monobook.css style sheet.

Disadvantages:

• The font specification list would live in a style sheet, where it can only be edited by an admin or developer.

Any comments? —Michael Z. 20:22, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

After I wrote the proposal above, I got an idea. Template:IPA now looks like this:

<span class="IPA" style="font-family:Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS, 

     Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; font-family:inherit;">

• The second font-family declaration overrides the first, in CSS-compliant web browsers.
• MSIE/Win doesn't understand the inherit value, so it still applies the fonts.
• The class="IPA" attribute allows users to specify their own styles. Add something like this into your style sheet, at User:XXX/monobook.css (where XXX is your user name):

.IPA { color: red; }

—Michael Z. 20:40, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

• The problem is that on IE6/XP the second font-family spec overrides the first, and so, unless there's an "inherit" font installed, it winds up reverting to whatever font is used in the surroundings of the embedded span (it inherits, in other words!). I've tried putting the special "inherit" tag at the beginning of the fontlist, but that didn't work either. IE seems to function OK if the inherit tag is at the end of the fontlist (current revision), but I have no way of testing what it does on other platforms. A. Shetsen 22:31, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Aw crap—that browser's brokenness has cost me hundreds of hours of work. I read in my reference that it doesn't support "inherit", but never thought that the reference to a non-existent font would completely replace the previous declaration. I'm going to try something else. If I revert it temporarily it's because I'm doing some testing. —Michael Z. 23:03, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

Oops. Same diff as with font-family. Seems a deeper solution is called for. OK. I'm installing MediaWiki on my Pentium 300 with 64 MB memory :). A. Shetsen 23:15, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ta-dah!!! on IE6. Thank you, Michael. Alex Shetsen. A. Shetsen 23:19, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[?] I tried something else, but it didn't work so I reverted the template. Looks like it's back to plan A: #Replace with IE-specific style sheet class, which should be quite easy to do if we can find a helpful admin. —Michael Z. 23:27, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

Okay, I'm going to try something else. I found two CSS filters to hide CSS from MSIE. I'll see if these can work. —Michael Z. 07:10, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

1. The !important property doesn't work in MSIE4, 5 and 6, so the second declaration should override the first in these browsers.

<span class="IPA"style="font-family:inherit !important; font-family:Lucida Grande, 

     Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000;">

Inherits font-family in Firefox/Mac, but applies the second declaration in MSIE6/Win (good), Firefox/win and Safari (not what we want).

2. spaced empty comment in the property should hide the declaration from MSIE6/Win only.

<span class="IPA" style="font-family:Lucida Grande, Arial Unicode MS, 

     Lucida Sans Unicode, Gentium, Code2000; font-family /**/:inherit;">

Method 2 seems to work right. Inherits font-family in Safari and Firefox, but applies the IPA font spec in MSIE6/Win. YAY! Please look at some IPA and tell me if everything looks right to you. —Michael Z. 07:40, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

• Looks good!! I've tested it with and without my custom monobook.css file. IPA and the rest of the conten display well on my XP/IE6 combo. Thank you!! A. Shetsen 19:02, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Phew! I was starting to get discouraged. I'm still going to see about adding the .IPA font declaration to a browser-specific style sheet, but it's nice to get it working as it should. —Michael Z. 00:25, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)

Looks very good on a common public computer with no particular extras added. This is a REAL improvement! Kudos!
--Ruhrjung 13:41, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Dear anonymous user from Australia (203.164.184.61, etc.),

Why do you keep changing this template? It's set up to work around a font-display inadequacy in MS Internet Explorer for Windows, and to not do anything in other web browsers. There's an explanation in #Technical details, above. If you're changing it for another reason, please let us know here.

You can override the font display for yourself only, by putting something like the following in your browser's user style sheet, or by registering as a Wikipedia user and putting it in your own Wikipedia style sheet. Registration has other benefits, too.

 .IPA { font-family: Arial Unicode MS; }

—Michael Z. 2005-01-22 16:54 Z

It's important, if surrounding the IPA characters with slashes or square brackets, to put these inside the IPA template, for instance {{IPA|/.../}}, rather than /{{IPA|...}}/, as otherwise a spurious space will appear after the leading slash or bracket. I realised this after seeing some of my edits corrected by User:Angr. rossb 06:57, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yup. I don't think it used to do this; anyone know if template behaviour has changed in the last week or two? —Michael Z. 2005-02-18 16:13 Z

In my opinion the brackets should be integrated to the Template already. Stern 07:59, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well, sometimes you want to use square brackets, sometimes you want slashes, and sometimes you don't want any brackets at all. And if you had three separate templates, the names of the templates would probably be longer than the two keystrokes it takes to type a pair of brackets. Compare {{IPA-slashes|bim}} {{IPA-brackets|bim}} {{IPA-plain|bim}} with {{IPA|/bim/}} {{IPA|[bim]}} {{IPA|bim}} Nohat 08:53, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Like in the german Wikipedia (see de:Enschede for example) the IPA-code should link to Wikipedia's IPA page. In the german Wikipedia the Template follows always directly after the first time the text's name is used -- without any description. Thats better than in the english Wikipedia. Stern 08:04, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The problem with linking the IPA transcriptions themselves is the underline that is standard in the link can get in the way of deciphering which symbol is present, particularly if there are diacritics that appear below the letter. But even disregarding that, the difference between the symbol for the velar nasal and the palatal nasal would probably be hard to discern if there were an underline crossing through the descenders. Nohat 08:53, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I do like the usage without a label, but I agree that a link is problematic. If the usage becomes a commonly-used convention, then I think it can stand without explanation, just as it does in paper dictionaries or encyclopedias. —Michael Z. 2005-03-17 15:58 Z

How about adding something like " [[International Phonetic Alphabet|*]]" to the template? J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 17:00, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I for one don't want to link to the International Phonetic Alphabet page every single time I use the IPA template. Sometimes I prefer to link to International Phonetic Alphabet for English or IPA chart for English, or nothing at all because I'm using the template for the twentieth time in the same paragraph. Also all those asterisks before linguistic forms would make people think they were either reconstructed or ungrammatical. --Angr/_comhrá 17:43, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's true, the asterisks would be too confusing. What do you think about adding a title-attribute:

<span title="This is an IPA-transcription; see: International phonetic alphabet." class="IPA" style="white-space: nowrap; font-family:{{IPA fonts}}; font-family /**/:inherit;">{{{1}}}</span>

This would look like this: /aɪ æm ən ɪgzɑːmpl/. J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 18:13, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's pretty good. I would edit the title slightly: /aɪ æm ən ɪgzɑːmpl/.

I would also be in favour of linking the text to International Phonetic Alphabet, and using CSS to prevent underlining. —Michael Z. 2005-05-2 23:51 Z

If we'd include "Pronunciation of xxx" in the title, then the template must include a regular spelling of the transcribed phrase. This would be possible, but it would be a major work to do so. Aditionally, I don't think it would be necessary, since the transcription will most of the times be preceded by a regular spelling version.

I've tried to make the css disappear the underline. However, this css is overwritten by the settings in the preferences (and probably by browser settings as well). If we look what the following produces:

[[International Phonetic Alphabet|<span class="IPA" style="text-decoration:none; white-space:nowrap; font-family:{{IPA fonts}}; font-family /**/:inherit;">{{{1}}}</span>]]

Then we see that the underline stays: /aɪ æm ən ɪgzɑːmpl/. J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 09:52, 3 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's text-decoration: none, but it won't work in an inline style, because the style sheet's :hover selector is more specific. To make this work we need the co-operation of an admin who can edit monobook.css. —Michael Z. 2005-05-3 15:31 Z

... can be found here and can be copied to the english Wikipedia. Stern 08:06, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. Some of these will be helpful, although I must confess some of them are quite amusing, such as the British pronunciations of American places. [ˈaːkənsɔː] and ['ʌɪdəhəʊ], indeed! Nohat 09:05, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've been adding the IPA template to the Brazilian Portuguese article, which had a lot of IPA without the template, but there are one or two characters that are worse with the template than without it. Notably #7869 displays correctly wihout the template — ẽ , but as the null glyph with the template — ẽ . Any suggestions? rossb 10:07, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Font problem. The current font order is Code2000, Gentium, Lucida Sans Unicode, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Grande (Template:IPA_fonts). Both Code2000 and Gentium contain the character, but Lucida Sans Unicode does not. I suspect you do not have Code2000 or Gentium, but do have LSU. Since Arial Unicode MS also includes the character, I'll move that one before Lucida. User:Anárion/sig 10:19, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This seems to have cured the problem! rossb 13:39, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have created Template:SAMPA and Template:IPA-SAMPA, the first simply a class wrapper for SAMPA code in the same vein as the IPA class, the second is for pages where both IPA and SAMPA are given, and allows the user to turn off one or the other based on their preference, such as:

.IPA { color: green; }
.IPA-SAMPA .SAMPA { display: none; }

Nicholas 22:17, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I think. I just hope people don't take this as an incentive to add gobs of hideous SAMPA to lots of articles. Nohat 01:16, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Concurrance, although Wikipedia policy is preference for IPA, I realise that some people may not be able to display IPA or may be familiar with SAMPA and not IPA, and prefer to see that. I originally did this in Received Pronunciation (2 October or so) with classes 'ipa' and 'sampa' but it got reverted for adding HTML tags liberally throughout the article. This template method is much better. Personally I'd never heard of SAMPA till I saw it on Wikipedia, and honestly can't agree more that it's the most hideous thing I've seen in linguistics :-) Nicholas 09:38, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think there are now very few articles in the English Wikipedia that still use SAMPA to show the pronunciation of a particular word. Several editors (including myself) have been systematically replacing it with IPA. it does of course still exist in specialist articles on linguistic matters, but could probably be largely removed there as well. I think it's unlikely that any significant number of people would be familiar with SAMPA and not IPA, give that SAMPA is merely a kludge for displaying IPA on computer systems that can't cope with IPA characters. And just about every modern dictionary I've looked at recently (in the UK) uses IPA. I think that American dictionaries may use other schemes, but I can't imagine SAMPA will be among them. rossb 18:49, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The real problem with this is that some articles will have just IPA, others just SAMPA. If I can't see the SAMPA, then I won't take the opportunity to quickly add the IPA (and probably nuke the SAMPA). —Michael Z. 2005-04-7 23:18 Z

I don't understand this point about not seeing the SAMPA. If the SAMPA is there, anyone can see it, it doesn't need any special characters (which is the whole point of it after all). In practice there should be almost no articles left that contain SAMPA and not IPA (other than a few more complex specifically linguistic articles, which if they don't have IPA should already have had their talk pages marked with the convertIPA template). rossb

I was referring to Nicholas' proposal of hiding SAMPA. —Michael Z. 2005-04-8 14:00 Z

Is the no-wrap meant to prevent breaks between syllables? Is IPA breaking at just any old letter, or just at the periods? Nowrap is not terrible, but it's a bit awkward in long bits in a narrow browser window, like in the intro for Nikita Khrushchev. —Michael Z. 2005-04-13 00:01 Z

Keep it. IPA examples should be short (one word or one sound only), and it is not nice if this is wrapped. Especially MSIE is horrid with this: it seems to want to create a horizontal scrollbar if an IPA snippet is wrapped even if otherwise not needed, because of serious errors in the font family handling. User:Anárion/sig 00:14, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

At least in my browser with the fonts I have installed, some IPA characters show up wrong. ɡ is supposed to be a handwritten g, i.e. identical to g in sans-serif fonts, but for me (at least, and presumably others as well) it shows up identical to γ (gamma from the Greek alphabet, not the IPA alphabet). Also ʁ, the inverted small capital R, is supposed to have the vertical stroke on the left, the rounded part on the lower right, and the diagonal in the upper right. But instead it's displayed with the vertical stroke on the right, the rounded part on the lower left, and the diagonal in the upper left. I don't know which font is creating these problems, but maybe we should stop using it. --Angr/_comhrá 19:46, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

These characters look correct on my browser here - I'm using plain vanilla IE6 on Windows 2003. rossb 21:51, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm using plain vanilla Netscape 7.2 on Windows XP. When I use IE it works. --Angr/_comhrá 22:34, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

look fine to me in Opera and MSIE on WinXP. User:Anárion/sig 23:47, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Am I the only Wikipedian who uses Netscape? I even added ".IPA { font-family: Doulos SIL; Gentium; }" to my monobook.css page to force fonts that I know display the characters correctly, but it still doesn't work; those fonts don't show up. It's very confusing, because every IPA-containing sans-serif Unicode font I have installed on my computer (Arial Unicode, Lucida Sans Unicode, Microsoft Sans Serif) has those two characters correct when I use them on MS Word. --Angr/_comhrá 11:16, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

That should be .IPA { font-family: Doulos SIL, Gentium; }, with a comma. Try .IPA { font-family: Doulos SIL, Gentium !important; }, or making the selector more specific, like span.IPA { .... —Michael Z. 2005-04-15 15:22 Z

Thanks, Michael! I added both "span" before and "!important" after and now it works. --Angr/_comhrá 19:27, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Glad it worked. Also, because of WP's caching, I find I can't test changes to monobook.css or monobook.js. They'll just show up within a day or two. —Michael Z. 2005-04-15 19:32 Z

IPA is often nigh-illegible with the default font size, so I've found myself increasing the text size just to see what's going on. I now have my monobook.css set to display IPA at 16pt which is much nicer. Any thoughts on this? It does stand out, but then so does the image rendering of math TeX markup. Probably something other than points would have to be used in the CSS since people may be using different base font sizes. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 21:49, May 23, 2005 (UTC)

With Firefox running on Mac OS 10.3.9 I can't get the diacritics for tones and and word accents to show upp properly. I just get the white boxes. However, when I helped Mark Dingemanse with some of his language articles, I noticed that when used in his vowel tables, they work like a charm! I tried with all kinds of tone diacritics, and they all seemed to work with his tables. Here's one of from Gbe languages:

Any idea why they show up properly with Marks method, but not with this template?

Peter ^Isotalo 16:56, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Try installing more fonts. For me (Firfox 1.0 on OS X 10.2.1) it works all right when I install TITUS Cyberbit Basic and Gentium. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 19:54, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But the font families that are used in the table (Arial Unicode MS and Lucida Sans Unicode) are both present in the supporting Template:IPA fonts. Surely that must mean that the problem somehow lies in the template, not the lack of fonts. And since bishonen complained about the same problem, and is also using Firefox and OS 10, I suspect there are others who are having the same problem.

Peter ^Isotalo 20:27, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

For reference, here are the characters from the table above:

• no formatting: ĩ, ũ, ẽ, õ, ə̃, ɛ, ɛ̃, ɔ, ɔ̃, ã
• with template:IPA: ĩ, ũ, ẽ, õ, ə̃, ɛ, ɛ̃, ɔ, ɔ̃, ã

—Michael Z. 2005-05-25 21:08 Z

Those show fine for me with Opera 8.01/Windows, so if multiple Firefox/OSX users have a problem it must be a platform issue (browser or OS), not a problem with the template. User:Anárion/sig 23:08, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

That's what I think, too. When I remove the fonts I've mentioned, then not all the signs will show up correctly, even though when I copy paste them to a Unicode compliant application (such as TextEdit), all of them appear. There seems to be a problem with certain Mac OS X fonts on Firefox. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 09:22, 26 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But how can it not be a template problem if the fonts work fine in the table but not in the template? It doesn't seem particularly constructive to claim that an OS is incompatible with a template which is designed specifically to fix these problems. Telling me to get more fonts is fine and all, but this will obviously be a problem to other users as well.

Peter ^Isotalo 15:11, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

The template is designed to only affect the font display in MSIE/Windows, which has some major font display inadequacies. It shouldn't affect Firefox, Safari, etc. at all.

In the table above, the font specification affects all browsers, if the specified fonts are present. —Michael Z. 2005-05-26 16:28 Z

In the appropiate place (which one?), there should be a note that Firefox/Mac OS X has some troubles with some fonts (which ones with which ones?). The signs I have most troubles with are the tone signs: Unless I activate Gentium or Titus, I'll only see ? ? ? ? ? (or nothing at all) instead of ˥ ˦ ˧ ˨ ˩, even though they all show up correctly when I copy paste them to TextEdit. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 23:05, 26 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I use safari in mac 10.3.9. I think the problem has to do with what fonts are specified. The template does not affect anything at all for me, this is because of the font-family /**/:inherit; declaration. In Mark's table above, the font-family is specified and thus affects what is displayed. Whatever font is specified by the Mac browsers does not display the diacritics correctly. You can see this by comparing the tables below (I dont use Code2000, Chrysanthi Unicode, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Bitstream Cyberbit, or Bitstream Vera):

I dont know what to suggest for this. This font behaviour has something to do with Wikipedia itself. I think this because if I save this page as HTML locally (i.e. it doesnt reference the style sheets or whatever it is doing), then the diacritic behaviour is fine without declaring any font-family. I think I have reached the end of my knowledge about this, so someone please help. peace — ishwar  (SPEAK) 18:18, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)

Here is the code for a quick test. Save as .html.

 <html>
  <head> test </head>
  <body>
  this is a test <br><br>
  <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" style="text-align: center"><br>
  <caption><b>no font specification</b></caption><br>
  <tr><br>
  <td>  i &#8226; i&#771; &#8226; u &#8226; u&#771; &#8226; e&#771; &#8226; o &#8226; o&#771;  </td><br>
  </tr><br>
  <tr><br>
  <td>&#601; &#8226; &#601;&#771; &#8226; &#603; &#8226; &#603;&#771; &#8226; a &#8226; a&#771;</td><br>
  </tr><br>
  </table>
  </body>
  </html>

— ishwar  (SPEAK) 19:57, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)

Different for me: On Safari 2.0 (OS X 10.4.1), everything displays all right except for the samples lacking font specification, no matter whether on the seperate file or on wikipedia. On Firefox 1.0.4, everything is okay, it is only annoying that i+'combining tilde' really is i+'combining tilde' and not ı with tilde above. -- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x} 01:47, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

hi. From what I tell now, the reason my setup (still Safari 1.3, OS 10.3.9) was not displaying the combining diacritics correctly has to be with the specification:

font-family: sans-serif

This declaration forces my version of Safari to use the Helvetica font, and it is this font which does not properly align the diacritics. (but Helvetica does align things correctly if I paste into TextEdit). If Safari uses another font, then this problem is resolved. Incidentally, if I disable Helvetica (through Font Book), then Safari used the Lucida Grande font which displays all diacritics correctly.

The font-family declaration is in Wikipedia's main.css file.

Anyway, maybe this just obvious to everyone else. If so, sorry. peace – ishwar  (speak) 03:38, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

Underlining obscures certain IPA characters, particularly those with descenders that may distinguish them from similar characters, so I've added the style "text-decoration: none;" to the template. This works in IE but not Firefox. Did I do something wrong? Usually Firefox is pickier about the exact format, but I'm pretty sure I've followed this tutorial exactly. —Simetrical (talk) 4 July 2005 23:10 (UTC)

What you were doing seems fine, but why is text-decoration:none; necessary? The word is not a link, so it shouldn't be underlined in any case, right?

If you want to make it a link, and keep it from being underlined, that won't work without changing Wikipedia's style sheet. There's probably a declaration in the style sheet like a:link {text-decoration:underline;}, which would be more specific in scope than text-decoration:none; applied to the surrounding span. The less specific declaration embedded in the page can't override a more specific declaration. —Michael Z. 2005-07-5 04:13 Z

I thought that any specification made in the style attribute of a tag is considered more specific than a specification made in the style sheet? a:link refers to any chunk of text in <a> tags, after all, while the low-level declaration only that specific chunk of text. —Simetrical (talk) 7 July 2005 02:27 (UTC)

My current recommendation is to never make IPA characters a link. If you want to link to something, make a nearby word a link instead. Nohat 5 July 2005 05:45 (UTC)

That just isn't practical in many cases. Look at Hebrew alphabet#Numerical_value_and_pronunciation, for instance, over on the right (that really needs to be reworked to be much slimmer, incidentally). What should be done, making each entry a full wikilinked name like Glottal stop? Better to have the descenders obscured but allow anyone to figure out what it means by hovering over it or clicking, than fill the table with characters that will be totally incomprehensible to 95% of viewers. —Simetrical (talk) 7 July 2005 02:27 (UTC)

Linking IPA text is not the magic cure to making IPA comprehensible to that 95% of viewers who don't understand it. That table is a huge mess and I'd say that the linked IPA does not add to the table's comprehensibility. IMHO, that table should summarize just the basic information for each letter, and the detailed information for each letter should be on each letter's page, which can spell out the name of the sounds represented. Nohat 7 July 2005 02:37 (UTC)

Possibly, but a single unified table is useful for quick reference. (I've actually split it into two now.) In any case, how does linking a confusing IPA symbol like x or j, or a completely incomprehensible one like ʔ, not aid comprehension if someone wants to know how yod or whatever is/was pronounced? —Simetrical (talk) 7 July 2005 03:18 (UTC)