If you are typing Latin without long marks, then you need do nothing, but if you need to include long marks, then you may want to use these tools.
Note: See the Web Development section for information about other languages using long marks.
Unlike other accent marks (e.g. á, ä), Latin long marks are not a part of the older Latin 1 encoding set used for Spanish, French and Italian, but they are a part of Unicode. Therefore, they are only fully supported in recent browsers and operating systems. Look for systems with basic Unicode support.
Please note which fonts are needed for each platform before viewing instructions to configure your browsers in the Preferences or Tools menu. Most browsers are recommended, but older browsers like Netscape 4.7 may need more adjustments.
Additional freeware fonts can be downloaded from from the sites below. These fonts are designed for medieval or ancient scholars.
Browsers which fully support Unicode are the strongly recommended. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
If you see question marks or odd characters instead of Latin long vowels you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
Recent versions of Windows include a Maori keyboard utility which allows users to easily type long marks from the keyboard. Users can either activate it from the control panel or download it from Microsoft New Zealand.
If you are using Windows XP or Vista, you can use the following ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a Latin character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available.
NOTE: If these codes do not work, you may need to use the Character Map utility.
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Apple has provided additional keyboards which allow you to enter Old English characters via Unicode. If you are working with a Unicode aware application such as Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit (free with OS X ), Dreamweaver or Netscape 7 Composer /Mozilla Composer you can one of several keyboards to input the characters.
For long vowels, you can switch to the Extended Roman
keyboard (10.2) or the U.S. Extended keyboard (10.3) then type Option+A,
then the vowel.
Note: You can also use the Hawaiian keyboard for macrons.
| ACCENT | SAMPLE | TEMPLATE |
|---|---|---|
| Macron | ā, Ā | Option+A, V |
For print work, there are also a number of freeware and shareware phonetics and classics fonts. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
For print work, there are a number of freeware and shareware phonetics and classics fonts. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
In addition to Latin, other languages like Maori, Hawaiian and Sanskrit also use macrons, so these languages codes will also be listed.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type bōnus with a long O, you would type bōnus. These numbers are also used with the Windows Word 2003 Alt codes listed above.
NOTE: Your page should declare utf-8 encoding or else the characters may not display in older browsers. Because these are Unicode characters, the formatting may not exactly match that of the surrounding text depending on the browser.
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Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
These links focus on Māori and Hawai'ian, but can also be used for Latin.
