[Building Sakai] Integrating phonetic signs into T&Q

[David C. Minugh]

At language departments, phonetic signs are indispensable. They are also 
difficult to work with in most computers. So has anyone developed an 
easily-integrated method to handle student input of phonetic signs in 
the Sakai  T&Q environment?
   Here's the problem as I see it (with apologies in advance; I'm 
working in an area that is not my specialty, and double apologies if 
Sakai developers already have a working answer that we at Stockholm 
don't know about!):

General comments:
1. Phonetic signs tend to be language-specific, i.e. general phonetics 
courses don't have the same needs as courses in English phonetics, 
Spanish phonetics, etc. Transcription systems in American textbooks 
don't match those in Europe, and the IPA (International Phonetic 
Alphabet) characters are not always the ones used, particularly when 
tailoring courses for lower levels.

2. Macs, Linux, MS probably don't handle these characters in the same way.

3. Browsers need to be able to handle them with standard fonts, or else 
students have to download and install special fonts.

4. Because there are so many phonetics characters, they mostly wind up 
in Unicode-8 type areas, well beyond the ASCII range.

5. Solutions for this area possibly resemble those for math, physics, 
chemical symbols, and are certainly relevant for the odd character in 
Old English and other historical-linguistics areas where non-standard 
characters are useful.


Known problems:
1. The SIL phonetics font was (still is, probably) incompatible with 
.pdf files; Adobe Acrobat, PDFWriter just quit when processing a file 
with SIL characters. Times New Roman works, of course.

2. The XP/Office 2003 Times New Roman font has an additional font, Time 
New Roman Phonetics, which contains nearly all the characters needed for 
English phonetics. But TNRP is not a standard font in e.g. our version 
of Sakai, and the T&Q "insert Word text" function converts it into TNR, 
which is useless: /?/ becomes /N/, for example. [The velar nasal 
character, if your mail client is not displaying this properly, becomes 
a capital N.]

3. The Vista/Office 20007 TNR font has greatly extended its character 
set, including many phonetics characters, so that you can enter its 
phonetics characters in T&Q, and they will be displayed properly, even 
in a browser in an XP machine. Sounds like a solution? Well...

    To enter a TNR phonetics character in T&Q in (our version of) Sakai 
while working on a test or exercise question in Vista, you:
    a. Open the "Word text" clipboard,
    b. Switch to an open text file in Word 2007,
    c. Hot-key in the character or call up Insert > Insert Symbol > More 
Symbols and click the character into your text file,
    d. Copy the character into the Word clipboard,
    e. Switch to the Sakai T&Q clipboard and paste in the character,
    f. Hit OK and enter the character (and any further text) into your 
T&Q question,
    g. Resize the font in that part of the T&Q question, so that it is 
uniform.
    h. Get on with the rest of the question.

Now imagine a student doing this for each phonetic symbol in each 
answer. And this still only applies to the symbols that Vista TNR deigns 
to include.

Solutions should:
1. Work on all browsers, and not be tied to a specific school of thought 
(e.g. if you want to show a central AmE rhotic vowel as /?/ [that's an 
undersized 3 with a hook], you shouldn't have to settle for a /3:r/ 
unless you want it that way). It ought to handle different requirements 
for different languages, i.e. have or be able to work with a font editor.

2. Make it *easy* for students (who don't know their way around 
phonetics at all yet) to enter the characters. We used to have a program 
written in Visual Basic that had a phonetics mini-keyboard that you 
clicked on, and it inserted the "weird" characters into your text; it 
was of course a stand-alone. This needs to do something like that, but 
be integrated into above all the T&Q function, machine-independent, and 
produce a decent text displays without further effort, so that students 
can concentrate on the pedagogic task at hand, rather than on computer 
manipulation.

3. Allow Q&A to be exportable onto a paper copy and/or a pdfv 
(definitely a secondary issue, however).


Is there such a beast? Will there be? Anyone interested in looking at my 
first attempts at T&Q uses for this, please contact me and we'll get you 
a guest account in our site to have a look.

Happy questing,
-- 

Lecturer David C. Minugh                E-mail: David.Minugh at english.su.se
Room E 877	                        Tel: (+46) 8 16 36 11
English Department                      Cell phone: (+46) 70 - 23 14 777
Stockholm University                    Fax: (+46) 8 15 96 67


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