#3 Italics

[Balthasar Bickel]

Dear developer

I very much like your implementation of the Computer Modern family in unicode, but I was wondering whether you'd consider expanding the Italics set, specifically with regard to the IPA range. Right now, the italics set only contains a fraction the unicode IPA set, e.g. it contains the velar nasal (the 'eng'), but not the glottal stop symbol.

This is understable since strictly speaking, IPA does not define italic versions and phoneticians would typically recommend using slanted characters instead (as in your CMU Serif Extra set). However, there are more and more practical orthographies in the world that enrich there Latin range by adapting one or the other IPA character, e.g. the glottal stop character. Used in practical orthographies, unlike in phonetic transcriptions, there is nothing that speaks against using true italic versions of IPA characters.

I think the most commonly used IPA characters in practical orthographies include only the following: LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED V, LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E, LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O, LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA, LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG, LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP,MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON). So perhaps it would not take too much to add least add italic version of at least these characters.

Thanks!

Balthasar Bickel
Professor of Linguistics, Leipzig (www.uni-leipzig.de/~bickel)