On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Katsuhiko Momoi wrote:
> How do users input or get a Latin letter (usually a vowel) with a macron
> (-) over it on Macintosh, e.g. to represent a long vowel in Japanese.
- -
> If this is not possible by conventional means, what are alternatives?
I have no idea of what might work on a Mac, but I'd like to mention
that using a circumflex is a fairly common workaround when you would
need a macron and can't produce it. I've seen it routinely used
e.g. at Perseus ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ ) for classical
Latin and transliterated classical Greek. These are cases where
a macron is the normal method of indicating vowel length in Latin
grammars and dictionaries and in transliterating Greek (e.g. an
eta is transliterated e with macron, to distinguish it from epsilon).
The use in Japanese written in Latin letters might be seen as
a similar case.
The idea is, of course, that vowels with circumflex belong to
Latin 1, so they are very widely available some way or another
(and can often be typed relatively easily e.g. using a dead key
for circumflex).
And naturally this is a matter of using a replacement notation
at a level different from the Unicode level. It's questionable
whether it would be applicable e.g. for Latvian names, where
a vowel with a macron is part of the basic orthography, as
opposite to various secondary notations.
-- Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/
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