We're starting work on a pronunciation guide for the website. This is also being discussed a bit over on rec.arts.sf.written, as some of you know; it kinda grew out of a query somebody reading one of the books posted. I'll bet some of you have specialist knowledge I don't have. If you're also willing to help or point me in the right direction on a couple of issues, that could be really useful. We need a good system for representing the pronunciations in text form. For various reasons I don't think the IPA is a good choice -- mostly that the people looking up these pronunciations won't be familiar with it, and it presents a rather large learning curve. Also that *I'm* not familiar enough with it to use it easily or accurately. So I'm looking for a pre-defined set of "dictionary pronunciation rules" that we can use (so public-domain). Having to create one from scratch is a LOT too much like work, it seems to me. Then, having found one, I would *also* like to annotate the definition to give the IPA names and characters for each of the sounds we're using. And preferably point to a really good IPA site with their own recordings of the sounds (so I don't have to do the work of making them, and run the risk of getting them wrong). (Seems like full-blown Unicode fonts have all the characters needed for IPA representations!). So I'm very open to suggestions on that. The other issue is putting sound clips on our site. I've got working WAV and MP3 clips up for a tiny sample of words, and so far nobody has suggested that any other format is really widespread or greatly superior for this use, so I'm leaning so far towards just providing those two, linked as they are in my sample at <http://dragaera.info/encyclopedia/data/pg-test/>. Anybody with sound for whom those don't play? Anybody know a way to make them play directly in more browsers (right now it seems very browser-dependent whether they just play, or pop up another page with the player)? -- David Dyer-Bennet, <dd-b at dd-b.net>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <noguns-nomoney.com> <www.dd-b.net/carry/> Photos: <dd-b.lighthunters.net> Snapshots: <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <dragaera.info/>