In anthropology we have to use very often linguistic symbols to describe foreign words or names. I am not an expert in this, but there seem to be different ways of transcription. One of it is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Some of us, like me, haven't got any idea of phonetics, but would like to painlessly transfer the "hieroglyphics" from our source texts into our own articles, so that at least no information gets lost. But it doesn't seem to be an easy task. The IPA lists some fonts for use with textprocessors like Word or StarOffice on Windows or Mac OS. A lot of fonts are able to write IPA-glyphs. A well known unicode font is Arial Unicode, which is distributed with Microsoft Office. Another great one is Gentium a font explicitly aimed for the use in the scientific community with multilingual requirements. I tried them all, but soon was diappointed: It seems, that all those unicode fonts contain the IPA characters, but some of them like the breve under a letter are only avaliable as "combined diacritical sign". This means, you have to type an normal character like "i", and then select the breve from the table with symbols. This is the result: Because the breve is put under the letter "on the fly", the position is only more or less under the letter. Looks definitly ugly. But after a lot of searching and some help of other science webloggers I found a better solution: The Titus Cyberbit Font is also a unicode font and contains also "combined diacritical signs". But: every unicode font has an area for type-specific signs, and unlike the other fonts this font contains here a lot of ready-made IPA-glyphs. It may not be complete, but at least I found the "i" with a breve under it: Well, this looks a lot better, no? The ready-made IPA-Glyphs are in the "private area" of the font, which is named diferrently on the different wordprocessing programs. Anyway, its the area following to the bopomofo script so you may easy find it. Update: Please note that there could be troubles by using different fonts in one paragraph. But Microsoft Word and Star Office/Open Office both have solutions for this problem. I can only explain in german: You have to choose "Format – Absatz – bei Zeilenabstand "genau" in Word or to activate "Registerhaltigkeit" in Open/Star Office (both in the Absatzeinstellung and the Seiteneinstellung).

Ask in the comments if you have trouble installing the font or inserting the symbols with your textprocessor.

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