Robert Wheelock wrote:

> Hello! A while back, I came across a codepage for the
> IPA phonic alphabet (which is usually lowercase
> unicasal) which had a 3-page (I think) .PDF file to
> download (which had the codepage table for IPA that
> would be the MS-Windows standard [or very close to
> it]). Would you know of where to look for it on the
> I-NET? Would you have a copy of that selfsame .PDF
> file yourself? How about native systems (languages in
> Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, ...)?

I may be wrong, but I think the only character set that includes IPA special
characters is Unicode (http://www.unicode.org), an encoding standard that
covers most (or all?) modern scripts used in the world.

On the Unicode site, there is a PDF file for each "block" (roughly
representing an alphabet), so maybe the file you remember was the one for
the Unicode IPA block (see in http://charts.unicode.org/). This would also
match your recall that it was the "MS-Windows standard": Unicode is in fact
the native encoding of Windows NT and other Microsoft operating systems.

I think that, before Unicode, IPA on computers was used mainly though "font
encoding". i.e.: you type in your text in a look-alike ASCII representation,
but using a special font where some letters have an "IPA look". E.g., you
type "[tSima'rOsti]" but, in your font, the capital "S" looks like an IPA
sh, capital "O" looks like an IPA open o (= upside down "c"), etc.

These "font encodings" are often an attempt to "beautify" the IPA look-alike
approximations that are used in e-mails and news groups (see, e.g.,
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/faq.html).

_ Marco