Deeply anal-retentive font geek question about IPA fonts.

December 18, 2008 2:56 PM

Roman IPA fonts and the non-roman characters who love them.

I'm looking for compatible fonts — a single family, or fonts from different families that look nice together — that do all of the following:

• Include a wide range of IPA and other Unicode Latin characters, at least in serifed roman and ideally in italic, bold and bold italic too.
• Include monospace characters, bold monospace characters, and slanted monospace characters, at least for the plain ASCII character set.
• Include small caps, at least for the plain ASCII character set.

Why, you ask? I'm a linguistics student (making the IPA and oddball Latin characters a necessity), I sometimes write software documentation (where I like to use monospaced fonts for things like user input and output) and I sometimes write about topics like metaphor and frame semantics (where small caps are conventionally used for names of metaphors or of frames).

At the moment, I'm doing all three — writing documentation for a bit of linguistics software having to do with frame semantics. We're self-publishing the result, and it would be really nice if it came out looking reasonably-professional.

Here's the fonts I've looked at: SIL's Charis and Doulos don't have monospaced characters or small caps. TITUS Cyberbit doesn't have anything but plain roman serifed characters. Computer Modern Roman doesn't have bold and bold italic monospaced characters, or bold italic serifed characters. Deja Vu doesn't have small caps.

(If all else fails, I will just use Deja Vu for everything and fake the small caps by shrinking down regular capital letters. But first, I want to satisfy my anal-retentive streak by finding out what it would take to do things The Right Way. We use XeTeX, so either TeX fonts or Type 1/TrueType/OpenType fonts will work. Professional fonts are probably not in our budget, but let me know if there's one or a set that'll do this anyway — I'm still curious what the real solution would look like.)

posted by nebulawindphone to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

It'll unfortunately cost you (font designers have to eat too), but you absolutely can't go wrong with Typotheque's Fedra.

I linked to the IPA font, but see the "related fonts" box on the right of that page for the whole family, which included a serif, a sans (actually several versions of each, and both have small caps), and a monospaced font. There is also a Greek and an Arabic version.
posted by Utilitaritron at 8:16 AM on December 20, 2008