Feature request: Let us easily write in IPA and tree diagrams

Question

Giving an IPA transcription or a tree is very often necessary in discussing linguistics topics, but it is exceedingly slow and painful to do it here, because the editing software seems to have no special provision for it. I know a little about doing it using external tools, but that is so much trouble that I would seldom do it.

IPA is difficult to provide for, and I have no ideas about doing it. I do have an idea about formatting tree diagrams. I'll give you the format for specifying trees that I worked out a while back for making class handouts. It uses indentation.

Imagine a simple tree for "A fruit fell into the garbage can". Here's the way I'd like to write the code for a suitable tree:

S
 NP
  Det
   a
  N
   fruit
 VP
   V
    fell
   PP
    P
     into
    NP
     Det
      the
     N
      garbage
      can

I imagine the intent of this is obvious. In the display, S labels the top node, and additional indentation means that a label is for a daughter of the preceding node. Lines with the same indentation and not separated by a line with less indentation are tree sisters. That's it -- very simple.

I'd love to be able to illustrate answers with trees.

The programs I wrote a long time ago to format trees in the above indented format are still available here: https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/tree?lang=en . I doubt they'd be any use these days.

Answer 1

I personally think that a web TeX renderer that uses SVG (like what Mathematics SE has) will work because:

1) you can type with your normal QWERTY keyboard, it even works on handheld devices.

2) No need for special programms and installations. It requires less work. And it's easy. Same can be done for vowel charts, tree diagrams etc.

Answer 2

For general-purpose character typing, there are two programs. Allchars (available from Sourceforge) is free, and Accent Composer (Kovach Computing) is about $25. In both cases, you provide a 2-character input sequence which returns a single unicode character. The program is invoked via a hotkey such as F12 or tapping right-ctrl followed by the letter sequence, ego. F12-n-g could return ŋ. This provides a uniform method of inputting arbitrary characters in an window -- in your browser, composing email in T-bird, writing a document, or grepping at the command line (is not a browser add-on). You tailor the key sequences to whatever is mnemonic for you (since the pre-defined key settings don't pander to the interests of linguists). This methods encompasses any arbitrary arrangement of unicode characters, rather than defining small subsets of characters as a "language". IMO Accent Composer is easier to configure and has more options for specifying the hotkey.