Re: [NTG-context] IPA transcription

On 23 Mar 2017, at 21:04, Nicola wrote:

On 23/03/2017 18:30, Hans Åberg wrote:

...

You might try the text substitutions service: System Preferences > Keyboard > Text. One chooses replacement text and what it should be substituted into. See the thread "Input methods" for an automated approach to generating large substitution sets.

Sure, that's another possibility. A drawback of that approach, as far as I can see, is that those substitutions are applied globally across the system.

It can be turned on/off, say by adding System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, App Shortcuts for Text Replacement & Hide/Show Substitutions. (^<cmd>T & ^<cmd>S seems fairly safe.) Also, one might try replacements with some escape code, say using # or \.

Btw, Vim has a similar feature, called `iabbrev`: the advantage is that replacements are editor-specific and the method is cross-platform (because Vim is). Vim also offers support for inputting “digraphs” and for defining your own.

It does not seem to work with combining characters.

Even better, for the use case at hand, is that you may also define your own keymap, e.g.:

One can make MacOS keymaps using Ukelele, but that is very time consuming. The text substitution system is very fast, both in terms of creating it, and using. I made a system for all the over one thousand math styled alphanumeric symbols. It is tricky to make sure there are no conflicts, and the .plist format is right, which is why I wrote the C++ program.

Anyway, for me the IPA keyboard layout is what has worked best.

That might work well of the set of characters is fairly small.