🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello everyone!

I have a few questions concerning the availability of
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) fonts in PostScript
Type1 Format for the Macintosh.

I am aware of the IPA Fonts from Linguists Software (IPA-Roman,
IPA-Plus and IPA-Sans), because my university has bought them.
However, I find they all look awful (except for those characters 
which are actually references to Adobe Times) and only one of them
is type 1. Because they also cost quite a bit, I do not bother to
buy them for private use but would rather try to make my own IPA.
I need IPA quite often and after the Macintosh made a font maniac
out of me I just cant bear bad type anymore!

Creating a font from scratch, however, seems to be a major task
and therefore I wanted to check first if anything better than 
the fonts mentioned already exists.

Also I would like to know if there is something like a standard
ASCII mapping for IPA characters. I find the mapping of the 
Linguists Software fonts quite odd (with square brackets [] on
the keyboard position of braces {} e.g.), however, for the sake 
of document exchangability I feel I should stay consistent with 
any existing standards or quasi standards.

As far as I know font-creation programms such as Fontographer
possess the ability to create composite fonts, i.e. fonts that
actually do not contain all characters but point to another font
for some character definitions instead. This is a good thing 
since IPA contains quite a few standard characters. If I created 
(and eventually distributed) such a composite font which 
references  some font that I can rely on being present in any 
Postscript printer (e.g. Palatino) would I have to seek any 
licensing agreement with the supplier of that font (i.e. Adobe)?

Any comments or hints will be greatly appreciated!
I will post a summary of results.

Matthias