Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Non unicode font issue

Mar 6, 2016 6:23PM PST
http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=898781Untitled.jpgHello,

I have a font issue on some Windows programs. It is about SPT phonetic, a non Unicode font set used for phonetic transcription. Most of the characters are displayed correctly but there are three problematic ones. Normally I use Unicode characters in my documents of various types, but I have some older dictionaries that require SPT phonetic to display pronunciation. These dictionaries not being widespread, I’ll give my examples in Excel. The problem occurs only with French, the English phonetic signs are correctly displayed. I am positive that the problematic signs can also be correctly displayed, for the problem started only recently, before it was all right. I must have changed something accidentally or Windows did it, or a bug. In order to find a solution, I tried to play around with the international setting, but it didn’t help. (I read it somewhere that these may influence the appearance of non-Unicode characters). I don’t know what else to try. Any suggestions are welcome. I’ll try to upload some screenshots. By the way, the problematic font behaves (or rather misbehaves) identically in the dictionary and in Excel, that is, the same characters are not displayed correctly. So, there must be some general OS-wide setting at the root of the problem.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Screenshot
Mar 6, 2016 6:27PM PST
- Collapse -
screenshot
Mar 6, 2016 6:29PM PST
- Collapse -
Rare.
Mar 7, 2016 8:53AM PST
https://www.google.com/search?q=SPT+phonetic%2C&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 finds prior complaints, warnings and how to install. https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=hu&u=http://videoweb.nie.edu.sg/phonetic/fonts/phfonts.htm&usg=ALkJrhiLUkGQwgBAUogRlSWK-pAu1nQweg

If you used some of those .exe versions I fear it's not what it seems and may screw up.

If that still fails you should create a new font file using tools you find on the web today.
- Collapse -
reply
Mar 13, 2016 5:29PM PDT

Thank you mac, but it is a different font: SPT phonetic. (You can see it on the screenshot, shown in the font field of the excel sheet). Installing tnrphon didn’t change anything.

- Collapse -
I did search on SPT phonetic and
Mar 13, 2016 5:42PM PDT

The complaints are out there with plenty of warnings and an install note that leaves me wondering if today's users can handle this.

If everything fails, time to contact the folk that made this font.