How to use phonetic IPA characters in LaTeX

There are two ways to write IPA symbols in LaTeX. One uses regular pdfLaTeX and the tipa package; the other uses XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX and you can enter the symbols directly into your source, assuming you have the correct fonts.

The SIL Doulos font is an excellent Unicode IPA font that is widely used in Linguistics. You can download it here.. But many other OpenType fonts have a full set of phonetic characters too.

I'll outline both techniques here:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tipa}
\begin{document}
\textipa{[DIsIzs@maIpieI]}

\textipa{[Its\*rilijizitutaIp]}
\end{document}

Using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Doulos SIL}
\begin{document}
[ðɪsɪzsəmaɪpeɪ]

[ɪtsɹilijizitutaɪp]
\end{document}

Output:

There are advantages and disadvantages to each method. The main advantage of the XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX route is that your source code becomes much more readable. The downside of this, however, is that you need to develop techniques for entering all the characters, which isn't necessarily fast. However, if you are already used to the TIPA input method (or have existing documents) the xunicode package (which is loaded by fontspec) allows you to use most (but not all) TIPA input methods as well, so for many kinds of input you can have either.

The TIPA method allows for a faster input method at the expense of less readable source.

If you need to type characters from the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), you can use the package TIPA, whose manual is also available. I found its sources within my installation of TexLive 2011, but haven't tested them yet.

There's also a paper from tug about it.

To research about special tildes and characters, you can read:

• How to type special/accented letters in LaTeX?
• Wikibooks: LaTeX: Accents.