How to display UNICODE/IPA characters within GUIs and plots?

I need to build GUIs and plots showing unicode characters and/or IPA fonts. How to do this? Please tell me step by step. Kind regards. Francesco

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Unfortunately, unless you draw the characters individually (or bitmap them into place), then all that you can access are the characters up to 255, together with whatever is supported in latek (such as greek characters)

Answer 2

[Francesco Sigona]

I'm afraid that printing characters below 256 not always work. For instance, I tried to install 'SILDoulos IPA' ( http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=encore-ipa-download ), then I tried to print 0xF6 char (for instance): unfortunately, the output is not the expected one, i.e., what I can see on the Windows' font management tool. Maybe I'm wrong?

[Walter Roberson]

To check: are you specifying FontName when you text() the strings into place?

[Francesco Sigona]

Thank you Walter. Yes I am. Does it work for you for IPA fonts? Phonetic fonts are becoming critical for my needs. I'm starting to think about moving to another progamming environment...

[Francesco Sigona]

To everyone reading this: do you managed to use IPA fonts within MATLAB? Please let me know. Thank you in advance.

[Walter Roberson]

I have not managed to figure it out. I did download the fonts and installed them, and can see them in the font list, but I cannot figure out how to activate the alternative symbols. (Note: I was working on OS-X, not MS Windows)

Answer 3

[Constantino Carlos Reyes-Aldasoro]

Hello.

This may seem rather simple but it *works*, you can just copy-paste the symbols from a webpage, for instance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart

directly to the matlab editor and place each symbol inside a cell, i.e.

phoneticSymbols = {'I','ɮ','ɳ̊'};

And that works fine. HOWEVER, this does not work cross-platform, so if you work in windows, will not work in Mac and vice versa. I am not an expert in phonetics so not sure if the symbols are accurate, but to my untrained engineer eye, they look fine, see the example below.

[Walter Roberson]

This only works for r2014b or later and when Interpreter is tek or none. It does not work for interpreter latek.