>Is there a list somewhere, either in an old message or on a website,
> of the typographic conventions for portraying IE in plain text?
Hi Crystal - and welcome to the list.
There certainly ought to be a list like that. We have discussed it before -
though it might be a year or two back - but it should still be in the
archives.
The simple answer is that we put diacritics after the letter, rather than
above or below them. For some common sounds, we get away with using
capitals, but only if it's fairly obvious what we mean. Otherwise we have
to explain. Vowel length is shown by the colon : after the vowel. It's not
a system, let alone a good system, but we stumble through.
The convention has arisen recently of writing superscript letters as
capitals, so that gW means a labialised g - written normally as g with a
superscript w.
Peter