Māori Macron Characters in OS X
How to setup and use macron characters in Cocoa, and Carbon applications with Unicode support, in OS X. This explains what I think is the easiest method.
Setup
- Go into System Preferences→International
- Select the Input Menu tab
- Turn on Maori and/or U.S. Extended (see below for the difference)
- While you’re here, turn on the very useful Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer
- The Input menu (flag) to the right of the other menus will now include Maori and/or U.S Extended.
Usage
- Go into any Cocoa application like TextEdit
- Select Maori or U.S. Extended from the Input menu. This will be remembered for a while (I think until you switch to a text box which doesn’t support it)
- If you’ve chosen Maori, type option-a to enter ā, option-shift-O to enter Ō, etc. (Alternatively type a grave followed by the required macron: ` followed by ʻe’ yields ē.)
- If you’ve chosen U.S Extended, type option-a, which enters a macron, followed by the vowel to place under the macron: option-a followed by u produces ū.
- To see all characters available in the current keyboard layout, select Show Keyboard Viewer from the Input menu
Notes
- If a macron character isn’t available in your current font, OS X will borrow it from a font which does have it.
- As of OS X 10.4.0 and 10.4.1 there seem to be a few bugs with the Input menu: sometimes it reverts to a previous list of layouts, sometimes the U.S. Extended and Unicode Hex Input layouts don’t work.
- As of 10.2, the standard fonts with macrons are Beijing, Courier, Didot, Futura, Helvetica, Herculanum, some of the Hiragino ones, Lucida Grande (which seems to have the best overall Unicode support), Monaco, STHeiti, Times, and Zapinfo. My favourites are Helvetica, Lucida Grande, Times, and Zapinfo.
- The Māori flag used is the Flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand (1834–1840).
Where
Notable applications which support U.S. Extended are FileMaker Pro (≥ 7), the Finder, iTunes, Stickies, and TextEdit.