Materials in Special Electronic Formats

on the SIL-Mexico website

Unicode

Many of the pages on this site use characters that are not part of Latin-based alphabets such as those of English and Spanish. This site uses the Unicode standard for representing these exotic characters in standard web pages. To view web pages that use Unicode, you need a font that contains the necessary characters. Otherwise, these characters will most likely display on your screen as little boxes. If any of the following characters look like little boxes, you don't have a suitable font:

ɧʊɽəƛɞŋʔɤʃ

We recommend that you download one or more of the following free Unicode fonts and install them on your computer:

• Gentium
• Doulos SIL
• Titus Cyberbit Basic
• Lucida Sans Unicode

If you install any of these fonts, then the pages on this site should display reasonably in your browser. If you use another Unicode font, you will probably need to specify it as your default serif font for your browser. Some Unicode fonts, such as Times New Roman, will have some of the characters that we use but not all of them.

Adobe Acrobat PDF format

Many of the publications available on the SIL-Mexico website are in Adobe Acrobat® PDF format. This format preserves the original look of the document while allowing you to view or print it on any computer platform by using the Adobe Acrobat Reader software (version 3.01 or higher). You can download a free copy of Acrobat Reader from Adobe's website.

Audio formats (WAV, RM)

Audio recordings are available in several parts of the SIL-Mexico website. The different audio formats available are represented by special icons which precede a description of the recording. So, for example, “cmiique” means that to hear the word “cmiique”, click the icon to hear the recording in Windows WAV format, or click the icon to hear the recording in RealMedia® format. Further details about these formats are below.

Windows® WAV format is built-in to the Windows operating system (95 and later), and if you have Windows or a Macintosh®, the necessary software should already be installed on your computer. (If you need to install it in Windows, check in the Control Panel under Add/Remove Programs, Windows Setup tab, and add the Multimedia components.) WAV format generally provides the highest quality recording, but takes longer to download.

RealMedia format is a relatively compact “streaming-media” format which takes less time to transmit and normally begins playing after just a short delay, since the audio is played in real time without first being downloaded to the hard disk. The trade-off is that sometimes the sound quality is not as good, and you need to install extra software on your computer. This software can be downloaded free of charge from the RealNetworks website.