[Tex/LaTex] Matching phonetic/IPA font for Minion Pro

fontslinguistics

I am (tentatively) using Minion Pro in XeTeX for my book, but I need to typeset a phonetic notation, for which Minion Pro does not have the glyphs. Are there any good alternatives that can match it?

Here is my Microsoft Word version (the one I am trying to reproduce in latex):

Desired phonetic

and here is the best I've done so far, using ugly Microsoft Sans Serif (also note that my brackets are not that good looking either):

My phonetic

By the way, here is how I do it in code (it would be great to get a confirmation that this is a sane way of doing this):

% Define a font capable of rendering IPA (phonetic) symbols
\newcommand{\phoneticFont}{Microsoft Sans Serif}
\newcommand{\phonetic}[1]{ {\fontspec{\phoneticFont} #1} }

...
was formerly known under various European names, such as Budschaja in German,
Bugia or Bougia in Italian, Bougie [\phonetic{bu'ʒi}] in French or Bidjaya.

If you have any suggestions (or tips) I would appreciate them. Even if it's using a different font. I just like Minion Pro as it's OpenType and that sits well with XeTeX.

Best Answer

There are two issues you need to consider here I suspect: the font shape itself, serif vs sans serif; and the font apparent size (MS font in particular tend to look much bigger than other fonts.

For the first issue, Aerlinthe is indeed correct, the SIL fonts seem to be a good bet, especially Gentium which looks very similar to Minion Pro.

For the second problem, I suggest using the fontspec option Scale=MatchLowercase. this will make sure that all font used will match in size.

A demonstration of this is 

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Minion Pro}
\begin{document}
% Define a font capable of rendering IPA (phonetic) symbols
\newcommand{\phoneticFont}{Arial Unicode MS}
\newcommand{\phonetic}[1]{ {\fontspec{\phoneticFont} #1} }
\newcommand{\phoneticScaled}[1]{ {\fontspec[Scale=MatchLowercase]{\phoneticFont} #1} }

was formerly known under various European names, such as Budschaja in German,
Bugia or Bougia in Italian, Bougie [\phonetic{bu'ʒi}] in French or Bidjaya.

was formerly known under various European names, such as Budschaja in German,
Bugia or Bougia in Italian, Bougie [\phoneticScaled{bu'ʒi}] in French or Bidjaya.

\renewcommand{\phoneticFont}{Gentium}
was formerly known under various European names, such as Budschaja in German,
Bugia or Bougia in Italian, Bougie [\phonetic{bu'ʒi}] in French or Bidjaya.

was formerly known under various European names, such as Budschaja in German,
Bugia or Bougia in Italian, Bougie [\phoneticScaled{bu'ʒi}] in French or Bidjaya.
\end{document}

which produce the following result

As you can see, irrespective of the font used the scaled version fits much more nicely with the text.

So for your actual document the file should look something like

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Minion Pro}

% Define a font capable of rendering IPA (phonetic) symbols
\newfontfamily{\phoneticfamily}[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Gentium} %replace "Gentium" with the font of your choice
\DeclareTextFontCommand{\phonetic}{\phoneticfamily}

\begin{document}

was formerly known under various European names, such as Budschaja in German,
Bugia or Bougia in Italian, Bougie [\phonetic{bu'ʒi}] in French or Bidjaya.

\end{document}
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