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New IPA fonts in Windows 7

Did you know Windows 7 ships with a set of good-looking fonts with a full complement of IPA symbols?

Microsoft has been making great strides on the IPA front. In Windows XP, the only IPA-enabled font was Lucida Sans Unicode. Windows Vista also had Arial, Tahoma and Times New Roman, which had been updated to include phonetic symbols, and the beautiful new system font – Segoe UI. Windows 7 extends IPA support to two good-looking fonts that first appeared in Windows Vista — Cambria and Calibri.

Here is a sample of the new and old IPA-enabled fonts available on Windows Vista and Windows 7:

Samples of IPA transcriptions in various fonts

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7 Comments so far ↓

  • rivo

    Yeah, they are really beautiful IPA fonts.
    :-) Nice to know this news.
    Thanks Antimoon, Thanks Microsoft.

  • kwong king shing

    Yeah, they are really beautiful IPA fonts.
    :-) Nice to know this news.

  • nahendra Padun

    beautiful. But how to install it? No answer.

  • Tae

    Microsoft Sans Serif, Consolas, Sirba etc. support IPA. They are not listed! Note that XHTML is commented out at the source . . .

    • Tom

      You’re right, Consolas seems to have the full set of IPA symbols. Thanks for pointing it out. It is a monospace font, however, and so it’s not very readable.

      MS Reference Sans Serif does not support the ᵊ character (possibly others as well). Sirba is not a font I’m familiar with — Microsoft Typography does not list it, so I doubt it’s a Windows system font.

  • Sara

    I need the symbol for nasalised [v], i.e. [v] with [~] on top. Can I get this in Windows 7 or is there a font I can use with W7 which will have this and other obscure symbols?
    Sara

    • Tom

      You would type “v” then a special character called a “combining ~”. This would result in ṽ. (I just used my TypeIt App to type this — I pressed v, then Alt+Shift+S for combining tilde.)

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