[Building Sakai] Integrating phonetic signs into T&Q

[Lydia Li]

Hi David,

Thanks for your research and detailed explanation.

We have not heard anyone who developed this feature for phoenics symbols 
yet. We have heard others requesting the capability of inputing math 
symbols or chemistry symbols, and I'm not sure if anyone had any good 
solutions for those. I'd like to hear what others have done or 
researched in this area.

Re "3. Allow Q&A to be exportable onto a paper copy and/or a pdfv" , 
just to let you know, in the next release (2.7) of Tests and Quizzes, 
there will be a new feature for Printing an assessment to HTML or PDF 
files which can be printed out (contributed by Universidad Politécnica 
de Valencia based on the code from Arizona State University. SAK-16765)

thanks,
Lydia


David C. Minugh wrote:
> 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: /ŋ/ 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 /ɝ/ 
> [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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