Maori macrons – a BBEdit script

Colin Jackson usefully listed out the correct codes for creating Māori macrons on the web, something that concerns all of us Kiwis, of course:

Te Reo presents some difficulties to printers and web publishers … In writing, long vowels are marked with a macron, which is a diacritic appearing as a horizontal bar over a letter. …The correct way to display macrons on the web is to use escaped unicode. Here’s a list of the five vowels with macrons, in upper and lower case:

ā	ā
ē	ē
ī	ī
ō	ō
ū	ū
Ā	Ā
Ē	Ē
Ī	Ī
Ō	Ō
Ū	Ū

[Via it.gen.nz: A national treasure.]

I’ve long needed to use macrons in all the writing I do that ends up on web pages. For that reason I have an Applescript I created for BBEdit.

Select a letter, call up the script and choose which macron code you wish to use to replace the letter. Click OK and the replacement is done. The script isn’t very fancy and doesn’t handle error checking.

You’re welcome to use this zipped version: SingleMacrons-bb.scpt.zip (6Kb). Improvements are welcome. Please share comments below.

Those of you with a sharp eye will see I haven’t used a macron in the title of this post. Post titles can do weird things if they contain ‘unusual’ characters. It was a deliberate omission on my part.

And, by the way, as I understand it, Hawai’ian uses the same macrons. Mac users: try switching your keyboard layout to Hawai’ian and you’ll find you can type ē, for example, by pressing Option e.

Very handy in a text editor.