SheetSwiper is a handy utility that converts an excel file containing the lexicon to a standard format text to be imported in Toolbox and FLEx. It is indeed extremely helpful if you have a lexicon in excel or tab format and you don’t want to go through manual editing. I will show here a detailed procedure […]
LaTeX and Journal Editors
I heard several times that learning LaTeX is just a waste of time, since its output, a PDF, won’t be suitable for the publication process. Well, actually this is not really true. Year after year, the PDF format is taking over any other format (TXT and RTF still remaining the best alternative standards). In Humanities […]
Short review of phonological databases
List of available phonological databases (to my knowledge): UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) Lyon-Albuquerque Phonological Systems Database (LAPSyD) Phonetics Information Base and Lexicon (PHOIBLE) World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) South American Phonological Inventory Database (SAPhon) Indo-European Phonological Inventory Database (IEPhon)
Parenthesis for graphemes
I wondered for a while which unicode parentheses I was supposed to use for graphemic representations. Going over the Charis SIL docs with a fine tooth comb and asking the support, I finally found out that the chosen parentheses for representing graphemes are: LEFT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET (U+2329): 〈 RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET (U+232A): 〉 These are […]
Frontispiece with XeLaTeX and the memoir class
When writing your thesis/dissertation, I am quite confident you came about (or going to come about) the “frontispiece problem”: how do the “hack” I typeset my frontispiece with XeLaTeX? Honestly, I also guess you don’t want to spend (as I did) a whole day trying and trying again different codes with the hope one will […]
Charis SIL and small caps
I had some trouble getting small caps in XeLaTeX with Charis SIL. After some (a lot of) research I found out that indeed Charis SIL has the small caps font. But if you want it to be available with the command textsc, you need to add [Renderer=ICU] in your setromanfont or setmainfont if you use […]
Typefaces and linguistics: help yourself!
Every linguist has to cope with typeface problems and every linguist knows what this means… Finding the right typeface can be a harsh work. From typologists to phonologists, everyone has experienced once a missing character, a misplaced diacritic, a non-Unicode encoding (vade retro). What is, then, THE linguist’s typeface? Well, Charis SIL is what you […]
iPad and IPA
When I saw this excellent post on iPad and fieldwork, I got quite curious. That wasn’t the first time I noticed or thought about the potential of using iPad for linguistic research, but I decided to try out a thing: using iPad for transcribing in IPA. I once tried it, without success… Problems galore on every […]