Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!yale!husc6!lloyd!kent
From: kent@lloyd.camex.uucp (Kent Borg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: How to Make Pronunciation Marks
Summary: Make your own overbar
Keywords: overbar  Japanese  romaji  Palencia
Message-ID: <177@lloyd.camex.uucp>
Date: 1 Sep 88 18:01:29 GMT
References: <3444@alvin.mcnc.org> <66425@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: kent@lloyd.UUCP (Kent Borg)
Organization: Camex, Inc., Boston, Mass USA
Lines: 53

In article <66425@sun.uucp> landman@sun.UUCP (Howard A. Landman) writes:
>In article <3444@alvin.mcnc.org> omo@mcnc.org (Julie E. Omohundro) writes:
>>Is there any way to make pronunciation marks on my Mac?  I mean pronunciation
>>marks, like in a dictionary entry, not accent marks like in a foreign language,
>>so the normal key caps options aren't sufficient.
>
>I want to know this also, however I can live with a *single* pronunciation
>mark, the overbar indicating a long vowel.  This is all that's required to
>transliterate Japanese.  Any "romaji" fonts?

Julie: To get all those strange symbols used as pronounciation marks
you will need a special font.  I think BitStream has fonts like that,
but I don't know of any that have been made available for the
Macintosh.  If you can't buy one, you could make one.  Fontastic seems
to be a good editor for creating a bitmapped font.  Fontographer on
the high end will let you create a LaserWriter font.  The bad news is
that creating a good looking font is a lot of work, and something that
not just anybody will be able to do.

Howard: If all you need is a single character it is reasonable to add
it to an existing font.  A few points to remember.  You must add it to
each size of the bimapped version of the font you are modifying.  If
the font is only bit mapped, you are done, if the font is a
downloadable LaserWriter font you will need to add it to the
downloadable file too.  If it is a built-in LaserWriter font you will
not be able to change what is in ROM.  A further nasty: modifying a
copyrighted font is likely to violate copyright law, and for
downloadable fonts they might have done some copy protection sort of
thing to the font to prevent modifications.

Once you get past that, here is how you can make a single overbar but
use it with different letters.  Use a double strike.  Create an
overbar character that prints, but itself has no width, that is, the
imaginary pencil that draws your letters does not get advanced by this
character.  In the font editor you use, move the little pointers that
show the character's width together until they are on top of each
other.  Put them to the left of the overbar if you want to type the
overbar before you type the letter, or put them on the right if you
want to type the overbar after the letter.

This is a fairly easy way to do your overbar, but you will have to
compromise the overbar's position and length to make it look
reasonable in all the combinations--so it won't look really great in
any of the combinations.  To make it look really good, you will need
to create a separate character for each combination.  

One other thing, for doing Japanese, look at KanjiTalk available from
APDA (at least for the moment, for as long as they exist...).

Kent Borg
kent@lloyd.uucp
or
hscfvax!lloyd!kent