Pronunciation character set or font

[quartz]

I am using Office 2003 on Windows XP.

I need a character, preferably in Times New Roman that would look like a
lower case "u" only with a single dot centered above the letter. i.e. A
dotted "U".

I could just be missing it, but I was unable to find it in any of the
character sets installed on my system. Does anyone know whether Microsoft or
any free ware sites might have extended character sets that include special
pronunciation characters? Such as the dotted "u" described above, a heavy and
light accent mark, etc.?

Thanks much in advance.

 

[Jezebel]

character 016F is u -- which might be sufficient for you. There's an
uppercase equivalent somewhere there also: trawl the upper regions of Insert

Symbol.

To understand what's going on with the character sets, have a look at
www.unicode.org. This is a real-world initiative (ie, not Microsoft). There
are some good special character fonts available at scripts.sil.org amongst
other places.

You can also construct your own glyphs by using EQ fields, eg to superimpose
a diacritic on another character. If it's something you use often, define
the field as an autotext entry.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Looking at the Unicode table at

http://www.unicode.org/charts/charindex3.html

it looks to me as if there is no Unicode sybol for "U with dot above"
(although other letters have "<letter> with dot above" variants, so if you
go the standard Unicode approach, you may need to use "u" with the combining
diacritical mark "Combining dot above" (Unicode U+0307).

However, you have to be using a font that contains that symbol, and Times
New Roman doesn't. One font you may already have that does have it is Arial
Unicode MS - if you start the Windows character map, select Arial Unicode
MS, check Advanced view, character set Unicode, Group by Unicode Subrange,
at which point a list of subranges pops up - find "Combining diacritical
marks" and select the relevant character (it's the eighth one, I think -
when you select it you can see the character code and Unicode name at the
bottom of the window.

Select it (nothing will appear in the window - I think that's an error) and
copy it.

In Word, type "u", select it and format it as Arial Unicode MS, then ctrl-V
to paste the dot. You should see a u+dot above. If you see 3 empty squares,
the dot has pasted in another font(in which case I'm sure you can sort it
out). You should be able to select the combined character and resize it as a
unit, etc. But I'd verify that these combined characters will do everything
your project needs - e.g. do they print OK? What if you have to generate
HTML pages? etc.

NB, as far as I know, you cannot type a u in a font that does not have these
marks (such as Times New Roman) then use the Arial Unicode MS dot. So if you
want to use this approach and need a Times font, you'll have to find one
that implements these marks. Otherwise IME the { EQ } field approach
suggested by Jezebel works OK: I've usually found it useful to create { EQ }
fields for characters at all the point sizes I need then save them as
Autotexts for re-use.

Peter Jamieson

 

[TedMi]

www.fonts.com and search for the word phonetic. There are at least 8
typefaces, including Times.

 

[Klaus Linke]

I don't think you're really talking about phonetics, rather about accent
marks that could appear over any character?

On the "Extended formatting" toolbar, there's a button control for emphasis
marks.
To show that toolbar: "View > Toolbars > Customize...".

To remove the dot, use the button once more, or use "ResetFont" =
Ctrl+Spacebar on the text.

Regards,
Klaus