I have spent a total of maybe eight hours in Lyx so far, and I am impressed with a number of things. I am a linguist and being able to create OT tableaus, PS trees and semantic notation will be great once I learn how to do things.
However, the most fundamental thing that linguists need is IPA characters, and I am stumbling trying to get that to work to my satisfaction. And that means not using a font that looks like Times or Computer Modern. Sorry, but I am fussy about what my documents look like, and those fonts make me want to hurl. Furthermore, the SAMPA-like IPA insertion thing is like 15 years out of date. Linguists today use straight Unicode insertion via the Unicode code point. But that's OK, I have figured out how to enter the Unicode number to get the character I want in general text without having to use a TIPA box. The problem is that the fonts that are installed by default in Lyx that I find aesthetically acceptable (Bitstream Charter, Utopia) do not have the necessary IPA and combining diacriticals blocks. There is the possibility of Bera Serif and Concrete Roman, but they were not installed by default and I can't figure out how to install them. Apparently there are TeX font packages for the above two, and also several others. I am especially interested in Nimbus because I have the regular TT version installed and it does have the IPA characters that I need. The problem is that I cannot figure out how to install these font packages. Can someone give an idiot n00bie a step-by-step how-to?
