Configure Safari for IPA
First things first
You won't be able to use IPA with some features of Safari until you have an IPA font installed, and most operating systems don't install one by default. So if you don't have an IPA font installed yet, go to Cool free IPA fonts to download and download one. If you need help installing it, go to How to install fonts on your computer.
General how-to and tips
Safari is a free web browser created by Apple; it comes installed with Mac OS X. You can also download a version for Windows from http://www.apple.com/safari/. (If you like Safari but you run Linux, you should use Konqueror.)
Viewing web pages
Most installations of Safari are automatically configured to display IPA correctly. To test yours we have created a Browser test page that contains most of the commonly used IPA characters. So before continuing, go to the Browser test page. Scroll down the page and look at all the characters. If any are missing or if an empty box appears for any of the characters, or if trash appears instead of the character, come back here and read the Troubleshooting section below for instructions on how to fix Safari to display the characters correctly.
Troubleshooting view settings:
If Safari failed to display some or all of the IPA characters on the Browser test page, do the following:
- On the top menu, click on View > Text Encoding and select "Unicode (UTF-8)".
Typing in web pages (e.g., a webmail account)
|
To insert special characters using Safari on a Mac:
- Make sure the Character Palette is enabled first.
- Click on Edit > Special Characters...
- This will bring up the Character Palette. In the View: drop-down menu, select All Characters.
- On the left-hand menu, expand Symbols and select Phonetic Symbols.
- Now you can select the IPA character of your choice and click Insert.
Alternately, you can select a character and expand Font Variation on the bottom left. A list of font collections containing the selected character will appear. From here, you can highlight the character in a particular font, then click Insert with Font.
|
If you prefer, you can also access the Character Palette from your menu bar if you enabled that option in your System Preferences.
Changing the default font settings
Here's how you can set the default fonts in Safari to different ones that support phonetic transcriptions or non-English script. (Note that if you change the defaults, results might be unpredictable on pages not designed to display IPA until you change the settings back.)
- Make sure you have the fonts you need installed in your operating system. How to install fonts
- Go to the Safari drop-down menu and click on Preferences.
- On the Appearance tab, select a standard font and a fixed-width font.
This will allow many of the web environments you visit to use your default font. However, there are many instances, like email, where your default setting won't be enough. For example, if the “To:” box (where you put the sendee's address) needs a sans serif font, you might need this to include non-standard characters, you might not. Your message box is yet another. In that scenario, you might need to select several fonts. If the options available in Safari aren't sufficient for your purposes, you might want to try using Firefox instead.
- Unless you followed the instructions above for troubleshooting view settings, the character encoding will likely default to something like Western (ISO Latin 1). If you are using a font that is encoded for UTF-8 or UTF-16, you will need to set the proper encoding. IPA fonts like Gentium, Doulos, and Junicode are usually compatible with Unicode (UTF-8) encoding.
- Test your settings by visiting our Browser test page.
But I still can't see my creaky voiced b. What can I do?
Well, if you need to view certain characters that aren't rendering correctly in Safari, you could try switching to Firefox, which has an option to override the fonts and styles specified by Web pages you visit. Or, if you're feeling really determined, you can create a custom style sheet and instruct Safari to use it:
(**instructions go here once we get this to work the way it's supposed to**)
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.