I code, You code, Unicode

In order to set the iMac up for regular use, I had to start downloading.

There are several phonetics fonts that are more-or-less standard in the field, so I had to download them from the SIL web site. The download was excruciatingly slow, causing me to wonder about the vaunted speed of the new computer. However, other downloads (Thunderbird, MTNewsWatcher, and StuffitExpander) were appropriately speedy. In addition to the fonts, I downloaded the SIL IPA keyboard layout, as using the Character Palette for entry of Unicode characters just doesn't work when you're using a lot of them. Long-time users of SIL's pre-Unicode fonts tended to know where various characters, such as ə live (in this case, it's shift-option-e), so having a keyboard layout that honors that arrangement is quite handy. After putting the fonts and the keyboard layout where they belong (/Library/Fonts and /Library/Keyboard Layouts, respectively), I restarted the computer (probably unnecessarily) and fired up Pages, or should I say, Pages 2.0? In any case, there are a lot more built-in templates than in the original version, including envelopes. But I used the boring blank template (I'm not sure that I would even call it a template, but that's just me). All the keyboard switching and font switching, unsurprisingly, works just fine.)

(In the process of preparing this entry, I discovered that the current version of Safari (2.0.3) doesn't support the various tools Blogger has available for easy composition of HTML-formatted entries. Oh well.)