The UTIFPA package for LaTeX

This package is a UTF-compliant alternative for the TIPA package for LaTeX.

TIPA is an awesome package which produces beautiful renditions of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Its only drawback is that it seems to accomplish this beauty by simply using a custom font which renders random characters as IPA symbols. This means that you are bound to the font they use; you cannot use a custom font. Moreover, it is not possible to copy & past the IPA it produces; if you do, you get the underlying random characters, which is gibberish when not rendered with the TIPA font.

This package tries to (mostly¹) work as a standin replacement which makes the opposite choice: It uses the correct Unicode codepoints for the IPA symbols, meaning you can use whatever font you want and also copy & paste the result. On the other hand, it does not guarantee that those characters are rendered beautifully; you as a user are responsible to choose a font which does this.

¹ Only mostly because TIPA uses a somewhat arcane syntax: It's mostly X-SAMPA but with some idiosyncracies. UTFIPA tries to adhere to X-SAMPA syntax wherever possible, even where it clashes with TIPA (the only major deviation from X-SAMPA still UTFIPA is that \ is replaced with * due to \ being a special character in LaTeX).

Usage

Assuming you have all the files in a location where LaTex can find them (see Installation), you can use UTFIPA just like you would expect:

\usepackage{utfipa}

Installation

UTFIPA is not (yet) in any LaTeX distribution.

Nix users can add UTFIPA to the package list in their document flake like so:

{
  description = "UTFIPA example document";
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-24.05";
    utfipa-flake.url = "github:sievertst/utfipa";
  };
  outputs = {self, nixpkgs, utfipa-flake }:
    let
      system = "x86_64-linux"; # or whatever your system is
      pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
      utfipa = utfipa-flake.packages.${system}.default;

      tex = pkgs.texliveBasic.withPackages (tl:
      [ 
        utfipa
        # tl.otherPackage
      ]);
      # or alternatively using the old texlive.combine interface:
      # tex = pkgs.texlive.combine
      # {
      #   inherit (pkgs.texlive) scheme-basic
      #   utfipa
      #   # otherPackage
      #   ;
      # };

    in
    {
      packages.${system}.default = pkgs.stdenvNoCC.mkDerivation {
        pname = "some-document";
        version = "1.0";
        buildInputs = [ pkgs.coreutils tex ];      
        # rest of your document derivation
      };
    };
}

Non-Nix users need to copy utfipa.sty and utfipa-symbols.sty files to a place where LaTeX can find them. This can simply be your document's root directory. If you want to install UTFIPA system-wide, the suggested location for the sty files is within tex/latex/local/ in your local texmf/ directory (typically found within your home directory).

Uninstallation

To uninstall UTFIPA, simply locate the utfipa.sty and utfipa-symbols.sty files and delete them.