In traditional typesetting, the font would be made from metal or wood. In both traditional typesetting and modern usage, the word "font" refers to the delivery mechanism of the typeface design. Each style is in a separate "font file"-for instance, the typeface "Bulmer" may include the fonts "Bulmer roman", "Bulmer italic", "Bulmer bold" and "Bulmer extended"-but the term "font" might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface.
In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, "font" is frequently synonymous with "typeface". Each font was a matched set of type, one piece (called a "sort") for each glyph, and a typeface consisting of a range of fonts that shared an overall design. In metal typesetting, a font was a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. The following is an introduction to Font by Wikipedia. Some character provide short-cut key sequence, for instance, to type ȳ, just hold the Alt key and press 0233 on the keypad as shown in the lower right hand corner.In this digital world, "font" is a fundamental to texts and data. You can input these characters in your document by selecting the character from the " Character Map" program as shown and select the character and copy and paste the character to your document.
Most of the fonts in Windows supports these symbols but they are not shown on the keyboard.
If you want to use phonetic guide, you need to change the language settings for Office for mac first. The default installation of Office for mac 2011 use English interface.