I’ve been messing around with the built-in OS X character palette whenever I’ve needed IPA for the transcription here, which ends up being pretty freaking often. It was getting somewhat cumbersome to drag and drop every single character, tone number, diacritic etc. So much so that I put together a text file full of most of the characters plus a few that are used frequently in transcribing Chinese language.

Then when that became cumbersome, I looked for other options. I found an input palette but that required me to jump from keyboard to trackpad and back, which is also a pain, so that was a no-go. In the end I gave up and wrote my own keyboard layout.

The image here should be explanation enough. The first set is without modifiers. Second is under the option key, third the shift key. The fourth one is both shift and option together. So shift+option+i will print ɿ.

It may be worth noting that this keyboard layout can not be used to type normally. It’s meant to be toggled along with other input methods for quickly.

I’m working out a few other keys but am mostly finished with this. If you’re interested in trying it out, let me know and I can send you a link or an email with the files.

Currently this only works on Macs running OS X. I’m working on a .kmap version as well, compatible with BeOS/Haiku and OS 9, and maybe a Windows version as well, though all more for the experience than any perceived need.