i like to think that by being a mac users i’m given a few extras not immediately available to those doomed to a life with windows. one of those is an ease with international text that windows still doesn’t handle so well even after a number of additional installs. a simple flourish upon my keyboard and i can switch between an extended latin keyboard, simplified characters with a pinyin input, traditional of the same, wubi input, arabic, hebrew (left over from college), greek (just in case) or uyghur (which is less natural to me than arabic but is needed for a few of those extra vowels and thus keep it around). to set up the same on the windows side of things would be a hell i’m just not willing to endure. if i wanted to be able to type hangul or devanagari or thai it would be all of 30 seconds of tinkering before it was possible.

so you can imagine my surprise when i realised today that what i’d previously ascribed to blogger eating my IPA glyphs was in fact a shortcoming of my system configuration. it turns out NONE of the fonts i had installed had support for the full range of IPA characters. the reason i was able to write certain characters in the comments but not the body of my post turned out to be because i was using two different fonts and one happened to have support for a voiced palato-alveolar fricative (i.e. /ʒ/) but not a voiced velar fricative (arabic and uyghur غ). i use IPA a lot when i’m transcribing wu, mostly since it’s the only way i’d be able to make the sounds anywhere close to correctly, so not being able to see it on the blog with which i’m documenting language learning is a bit of a pain in the ass.

not surprisingly there are fonts you can install to correct this. you can head over here and see what characters will show up on your system and, if it’s as pitiful as mine was, you can download and install lucida sans unicode which will fix it right up. i’m presently going through my old posts in which IPA was used and tagging it to render with that font.

i’m only ashamed it took me this long to fix this. now if only TextEdit would render my uyghur properly and stop eating characters in any word longer than 8 letters.