If you are typing Latin without long marks or combined letters æ,œ as two vowels, then you need do nothing, but if you need to include these characters, then you may want to use these tools.
Note on Acute Accents: For information about adding acute accents to vowels (e.g. á,é,í,ó,ú,ý) see the Old English page. There is no accented œ in Unicode.
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, German, Italian and other Western European languages, but they are a part of Unicode.
Therefore, they are not supported in every font or software program. Nor are there simple accent codes for these characters. However, programs with basic Unicode support can generally support long marks.
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.
In general, although many "everyday" fonts include long marks, they are missing in decorative fonts such as Comic Sans MS, Chalkboard and others.
Additional freeware fonts can be downloaded the sites below. These fonts are designed for medieval or ancient scholars.
Browsers which fully support Unicode are 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.
If you are using a recent version of Microsoft Word (2003/2007/2010), 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.
| Vwl | ALT Code |
|---|---|
| Ā | ALT+0256 Cap long A |
| Ē | ALT+0274 Cap long E |
| Ī | ALT+0298 Cap long I |
| Ō | ALT+0332 Cap long O |
| Ū | ALT+0362 Cap long U |
| Ȳ | ALT+0562 Cap long Y |
| Æ | ALT+0198 Cap AE lig |
| Π| ALT+0140 Cap OE lig |
| Vwl | ALT Code |
|---|---|
| ā | ALT+0257 Lower long A |
| ē | ALT+0275 Lower long E |
| ī | ALT+0299 Lower long I |
| ō | ALT+0333 Lower long O |
| ū | ALT+0363 Lower long U |
| ȳ | ALT+0563 Lower long Y |
| æ | ALT+0230 Lower AE lig |
| œ | ALT+0156 Lower OE lig |
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.
For long vowels, you can switch to the the U.S. Extended keyboard 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 |
| AE Ligature | æ, Æ | Option+' (singequote) = lowercase AE ligature |
| OE Ligature | œ, Œ | Option+Q (singequote) = lowercase OE ligature |
These are metadata codes which indicate the page of a language. These codes allow browsers and screen readers to identify and process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
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 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.
| Vwl | Entity Code |
|---|---|
| Ā | Ā Capital Long A |
| Ē | Ē Capital Long E |
| Ī | Ī Capital Long I |
| Ō | Ō Capital Long O |
| Ū | Ū Capital Long U |
Ȳ | Ȳ Cap long Y |
| Æ | Æ Cap AE lig |
| Π| ΠCap OE lig |
| Vwl | Entity Code |
|---|---|
| ā | ā Lower long A |
| ē | ē Lower long E |
| ī | ī Lower long I |
| ō | ō Lower long O |
| ū | ū Lower long U |
| ȳ | ȳ Lower long Y |
| æ | æ AE lig |
| œ | œ OE lig |
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 metadata tags which indicate the language of a page, 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.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]Last Modified: Wednesday, 19-Dec-2012 17:22:56 EST
