Diacritical fonts

In principle, an individual font may contain all the characters belonging to Unicode. However, such fonts will turn out large and hard to handle when, e.g., downloading them from the internet. In fact, the good news about Unicode is that it enables a single font to contain just the characters that are necessary – e.g., the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek characters (and the related diacritical marks), the IPA characters and different typographical symbols. Many ordinary fonts (such as Times [New Roman], Arial, Lucida and Verdana) contain some of the most usual special characters from different parts of the universal character set. However, there are just a few extensive fonts that are suited for producing the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.

You will soon be able to download a Unicode font designed specifically for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet on these pages. Before that, the Unicode fonts that work the best are the IPA (= International Phonetic Alphabet) fonts Charis and Doulos which are provided by the SIL.