Line Spacing Question

[Peyton Todd]

Hello. I expect this will be a tough question to answer.

A little detail first, then I'll get to my question...

I am writing a book in linguistics, and I don't have a publisher yet, but
most tings written in the field tend to be in a font which looks like Times
New Roman. And I believe lots of publishers nowadays just photocopy what you
send. So I'm writing the book in Times New Roman.

But I need to include a lot of examples of speech using the International
Phonetic Alphabet. The fonts which come with Word don't have anywhere near
the full set of symbols necessary, but I have found and installed a font
which has everything I need. It's a complicated system involving a program
called KeyMan by Tavelsoft Corp, and virtual 'keyboards', including one with
IPA symbols in Unicode. (Colleagues have reported getting drafts rejected by
publishers who didn't have the same plug-in they were using when they wrote
their book or article.)

Well, the symbols look great, and they're easy to use (different
combinations of keystrokes lead to the desired characters, like typing Ctrl +
~ and then 'n' to get an n with a tilde over it in Spanish, but a lot moreso.

But here's my problem. When I stuff some symbols into a line, say as follows:

asdf asdf asdf asdf xxxx adf asdf asdf afdf

where xxxx is the symbols, the line spacing between that line and the one
before it widens. So all the other lines in the paragraph look fine, both the
lines before the one I put the symbols in, and the ones below that line, but
the paragraph looks funny. I can nearly fix this by reducing the fontsize of
the symbols by a couple of points (e.g. the Times New Roman in 11 pt. and the
symbols in 9 pt.), but now the symbols look small and silly.

By the way, the symbols are an Arial font. But that's apparently not the
problem. I find it's possible to mix Arial and Times New Roman fonts on a
line without this problem occurring as long as they're all regular characters.

Any ideas?




everything ihaven't checked with the publisher yet, a linguist, and I need
to write articles

 

[Pat Garard]

G'Day Peyton,

In Microsoft Word, you can type accented characters (without
any other resources) using a simple set of shortcut keys:

à, è, ì, ò, ù, À, È, Ì, Ò, Ù press CTRL+` followed by the letter
(ACCENT GRAVE)

á, é, í, ó, ú, Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú press CTRL+' followed by the letter
(APOSTROPHE)

â, ê, î, ô, û, Â, Ê, Î, Ô, Û press CTRL+SHIFT+^ followed by the letter
(CARET)

ã, ñ, õ, Ã, Ñ, Õ press CTRL+SHIFT+~ followed by the letter
(TILDE)

ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, Ä, Ë, Ï, Ö, Ü press CTRL+SHIFT+: followed by the letter
(COLON)

ç, Ç press CTRL+, followed by c or C
(COMMA)

å, Å press CTRL+SHIFT+@ followed by a or A

ß press CTRL+SHIFT+& followed by s

¿ press ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+?

¡ press ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+!

As you can see, the symbol set is more than adequate even
for this NEWSREADER.

See also:
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/itc/resources/mswordpc.html
http://www.chumashlanguage.com/symbols/sym-00-tx.html

 

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks, Pat, but I do know about those. They don't even come close to
providing for the International Phonetic Alphabet. I'd show you what I mean,
but of course, I can't type those characters in this document!

 

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks, Jezebel. I'll try those fixes. However, there will still be a couple
of problems.

1. Am I limited to finite point sizes? If so, then (I haven't tried it yet,
so I don't know, but I suspect) I could still end up with something that
looks crappy. Like I said, I don't know yet, but it might be I'll be caught
between something which looks too much like double-spacing, and something
where the symbol characters are still too small compared to the regular text.

2. It's not just the printing I have to worry about. This book will also be
an e-book. It has to be because it's about a subject whose intonation
patterns will be crucial, and readers will need to hear them. In fact, since
ASL (American Sign Language of the deaf) is also involved, there'll be lots
of little video clips. So the result has to look good both in print and in a
PDF.

Yes, the fonts were free. Do you know if there's one I could pay for that
would meet my needs? Where would I look? Bear in mind that it's not just any
character set we're talking about. The characters of the International
Phonetic Alphabet are very different from what most people are familiar with.
They include what looks like an upside down 'V', an upside down 'e', both the
'a' like the one I just did and a version that looks more like what people
write by hand (sort of alike an 'o' but with a tail); and there's an 'open o'
(looks like a backwards 'c'), something that looks like an integral sign in
calculus, something that looks like a numeral '3' but hangs below the line,
an 'n' with a tail (for the last consonant of -ing), one that looks like a
capital 'I' but is no taller than a lower case 'i', and lots more.

So where do I go from here?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

To add to what the others have said, I would suggest that you first look at
the Latin Extended A and B and IPA Extensions character subsets of Times New
Roman in Insert | Symbol. There are, as Pat has pointed out, built-in
keyboard shortcuts for many of these characters, and you can assign your own
for any character. If these are not sufficient to your needs, then look at
the Arial Unicode MS font (it comes with Windows but may not be installed).
I think you'll find its IPA Extensions include everything you could possibly
need. There is no reason you couldn't type your entire document in this
font, which your publisher is also bound to have.

 

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks, Suzanne, but I had already tried the Arial Unicode MS font. Yes, it
seems to have the characters I need, but whenever I insert--> symbol one of
them into the page, it adds a space after it, which looks dumb. Except that
apparently it's not a space in the sense of an extra character since, if you
backspace over it (a single keystroke), the character itself goes away along
with the space. So it seems the character itself containg whitespace to its
right.

What I had been using to get around that problem - part of the complicated
solution involving the Tavulsoft 'keyboard' I described earlier - turns out
to be Lucida Sans Unicode. Experimenting Jezebel's solution of specifying the
line spacing exactly, I was surprised that it seems to work! It's perhaps not
exactly Jezebel's solution, which, as I read it, seemed to suggest making the
line spacing big enough to accomodate the larger size of the symbols (even
though their stated pointsize was the same). Because I can REDUCE the line
spacing so it looks right!

I know very little about fonts. I was thinking of each character as a single
bloc, like the hunks of metal I remember from print shop in high school
(Atlanta, Georgia, 1955). So I assumed it was just a certain size and that's
it, which is why the line spacing got bigger when I added the character. But
I find it lets me take it down further after all. Which suggests each font
must have a default area around each character.

But maybe that's not true, either, since Word lets me cut down the line
spacing down to where the characters on successive lines actually overlap
each other. Right now I have it down to 9pt., and the font itself is only 11
pt.

So now my only problem is that the Lucida Sans Unicode font looks like
boldface, which I wish it did not.

Also, I'm curious: What is the default line spacing of a Word document. I
believe that's what I had. When I take just any paragraph and go to Format
--> Paragraph Spacing --> Line spacing --> Exactly, it defaults to 12 pt. But
to my eye, 12 pts look slightly smaller than my paragraphs.

Peyton

 

[Peyton Todd]

Wow. My degree is actually in psycholinguistics, not linguistics per se,
where I'm more of an autodidacte. I never even heard of those alphabets you
mention!

I turns out that Word lets you scrunch up the line spacing a whole lot so I
can fit the characters in.

Thanks for your help.

Peyton

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The default line spacing of Times New Roman is 120%. This means that the
line spacing (or "leading") of 10-pt TNR is 12 points. For 12-pt TNR, it
would be 14.4 points. The built-in leading varies with the font, however,
which is why you get different leading when you mix fonts. Using "Exactly"
line spacing is the best solution if you're mixing fonts.

 

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks, Suzanne.

The default line spacing of Times New Roman is 120%. This means that the
line spacing (or "leading") of 10-pt TNR is 12 points. For 12-pt TNR, it
would be 14.4 points. The built-in leading varies with the font, however,
which is why you get different leading when you mix fonts. Using "Exactly"
line spacing is the best solution if you're mixing fonts.