STEDT Font

Attention! As of January 2011, use of the STEDT font is now deprecated!

Instead, you should use one of the many Unicode fonts that are now available, such as:

  • Charis (from SIL, which has bold and italics; this is what STEDT is using)
  • Gentium
  • Arial Unicode MS

Note also that there are programs available to convert your files (including MS Word documents) which use STEDT font to Unicode:

For Word files, you can download the STEDT-to-Unicode conversion macro for Word (45 KB, .zip).

There is also a Perl script for converting text files in the legacy STEDT encoding into Unicode. When run in a directory, it creates a Unicode (UTF-8) text file with the extension ".u8" for each file in the directory having the extension ".txt".

There is also a Perl module, in case you need a more flexible option to convert your old data and are conversant in Perl.

To type in IPA and other symbols using the STEDT keystrokes that you may know and love, download STEDT Keys for Mac OS X (version 1.1).

The information below is retained for posterity.

To accomodate the various orthographies of our source transcriptions, a special Macintosh font was developed. The original bitmap font developed by Stephen P. BARON in the late 1980's evolved with advances in typographic technology into STEDT Font for Macintosh, a TrueType outline font created early in 1993 by John Brandon LOWE. The font has been maintained by Richard COOK since 1998. A Unicode 4.0 font called STEDTU is currently available for download. Use of the STEDTU font (or, indeed, any unicode font) with STEDT Font 5.x data requires that the data be converted to Unicode 4.0 (see the converter below). Details of this font's development are presented in the documentation below.

The STEDT transcription font employs both IPA and non-IPA characters, including numerous pre-struck and full-width diacritics. The STEDT Font follows conventions set forth in the 2nd edition of the Phonetic Symbol Guide (PULLUM and LADUSAW 1996). Additionally the STEDT Font contains other characters serving to represent the orthographies of our various source transcriptions. Please see the list of STEDT Font Character Set Images, and also the current release of the STEDT Font Reference, below.

STEDT Font (Version 5.1.7) Release Notes and Downloads

STEDT Font (version 5.1.5)

2001-02-22 Release Notes: This version includes fixes to bitmaps, outlines, and metrics. Version 5.1.5 contains the complete character set of Version 5.0, and so is backwards compatible with it in this regard. Fixes in version 5.1.5 font metrics may however result in documents formatted with version 5.0 displaying slightly differently under version 5.1.5 (line breaks and page breaks in such documents may be slightly different under 5.1.5 in very few instances). Note that the separate STEDT Font bold and italic type faces have not been included in this release though they may reappear in future releases.

In addition, STEDT Font Reference 5.1.1 is now available. Font Reference 5.1.1 is a FileMaker Pro 4 Database file, available in stand-alone (Runtime) and fm3 database formats. Users who do not own FileMaker Pro 4 (or 3) should download the larger (1.5MB) Runtime version, or else refer to Font Reference 5.0 (also available below).

Software Notes

  • STEDT typographic work began and continues on Apple Macintosh computers.
  • Fontographer is a typographic design system
  • Filemaker Pro is a relational database system produced by FileMaker Inc.
  • SIT and ZIP compressed files on this website may be decompressed with StuffIt Expander 5.1.3 or later, available for free from Aladdin Systems.
  • Files on this website have been checked for viruses with Virex anti-virus software and the most recent Virus Definitions from Network Associates Inc..
  • PopChar Lite 2.7.2 (a Mac control panel formerly included in the STEDTFont package) is available here by permission of its author. Note: this CDEV (for accessing special characters) has not been tested with Mac OS 8 or later, and may or may not function properly under all configurations. If you are running Mac OS 8 or higher and wish to use this program to enter STEDTFont characters, see the PopChar X web site.