CharWrite©: A Unicode Input Tool for the Web
  Unicode has many advantages for linguists. It allows the display of IPA and almost all diacritics which linguists use in their work. It encodes almost all scripts currently in use, and many of the scripts used by ancient languages. In short, it's now possible to create web pages not only with basic Latin characters, but in IPA, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Devanagari, and a host of other scripts as well. This is why E-MELD uses Unicode for data input, storage, and display.

The problem with such a full range of characters, however, is that there is no way to produce simple key-strokes for them all. This means that typing Unicode typically entails selecting the character you want from a huge array of thousands of symbols in a table, and copying and pasting it into the field where you wish it to appear. This is such a clumsy system that E-MELD has developed a web based Unicode input facility to aid field workers with their data input.

Try our Unicode input facility: Enter a word in the field below. Right-clicking on the field (control-click on the Mac) will bring up a list of all characters which are similar to the last letter you typed. Click on the character in the list you want, and it will replace the last character in the field with the character you selected. If you would like to enter a tone mark, type a single left quote "`" and right-click. For length or stress marks, type bar "|", and for other diacritics type tilde "~". Double left-clicking (double click on the Mac) will bring up an IPA chart which allows input of any IPA character into the field.

Please note that CharWrite only works with browsers which have enabled popups. If you have disabled popups for the site CharWrite is installed on, the right-click functionality will fail.

Note: On Windows machines, this facility requires a browser that runs later versions of Javascript, like Netscape 6.2 or Explorer 5 or later. With Macs running system X, it works only in Mozilla, since Explorer, Safari and Opera have not yet implemented Unicode and/or javascript fully for that system. It will not work on Macs running MacOs 9 or earlier.

Download CharWrite
 

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