MyWiki:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 March 2

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March 2

IPA characters representation in VM/CMS in 1986

SGML and Oxford English Dictionary features a screenshot of the LEXX editor, a software especially prepared for the task by IBM, with a content offering IPA characters, in 1986.

What are the more plausible hypothesis to figure how to represent these characters in the screen in a text editor (and so a regular terminal)?

There is something I can conceive, as I found on International_Phonetic_Alphabet#ASCII_and_keyboard_transliterations several input methods existed. Yet, for document storage purpose, the size of the huge corpus make plausible the possibility to find a sequence of characters used to represent an IPA character used to represent the raw characters instead, so it would be more logic to represent each character directly. A possibility to solve these two issues could be an ASCII extended code page including IPA characters, but I'm not sure about how VM/CMS handles the terminal output. --Dereckson (talk) 22:59, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't know about displaying IPA in regular terminals, but I know many people use LaTeX to typeset documents that rely on IPA. See e.g. here [1], and here [2]. Classically, LaTeX could be coded in a text terminal (e.g. VT100, emacs, etc), then compiled into a .dvi or .pdf for separate display or printing. I don't think LEXX would display IPA characters in the terminal, would it? SemanticMantis (talk) 00:28, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

It did, as you can see in the screenshot. The description says that it used the IBM 3279's programmable fonts to display IPA, italics and small capitals. I don't know how they were encoded on the mainframe end. -- BenRG (talk) 01:29, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Oops, didn't look carefully enough, thanks for the clarification. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:56, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but these instructions might allow you to get IPA displayed in a terminal in OSX [3]. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:03, 3 March 2015 (UTC)