The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a useful tool for describing pronunciations. This project is an attempt to improve its accessibility to those who use assistive technologies. Dr. Robert Englebretson of Rice University has already provided JAWS character maps for the IPA symbols as well as a Braille representation.
This project provides another alternative: a Markdown preprocessor which interprets marked sequences of IPA glyphs and outputs one of the following:
- The sequence unchanged (the
-noption) - A marked sequence of symbol names
- A marked sequence of standard phonetic descriptions (the
-xoption)
The -s and -e options allow alternate markers
for the beginning and end of these sequences.
Consult the manual (ipax.1) or the help text (ipax -h)
for more information.
Copy ipax to /usr/local/bin/ or to another directory on your PATH
and ipax.1 to /usr/local/share/man/man1/
or to another suitable home for manual pages.
Some concrete examples are provided in the manual. They are copied here for convenience:
$ printf "there is a ((fi)).\n" | ipax -s '<' -e '>'
there is a <F, I>.
$ printf "the ((gɑŋ)) is ringing." | ipax
the (Begin IPA) G, alpha, engma (End IPA) is ringing.
$ printf "the ((tako)) was delicious." | ipax -n
the tako was delicious.Essentially, the ipax tool parses a Markdown file
provided as a command-line argument or on the standard input
and replaces doubly-parenthesized sequences of IPA symbols
according to the selected rules.