[WEB4LIB] RE: : macrons in html?

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Fri, 26 May 2000 alastair.smith at vuw.ac.nz wrote:

> This has been a concern in New Zealand/ Aotearoa, because the indigenous Maori language uses macrons to indicate the long vowel.
> 
> There's a resource page on solutions, including free fonts which display the umlaut as a macron, at
> 	http://www.kupu.mainpage.net/

That's an interesting site (although on one of my PCs, running IE 5, I got
script errors). The site makes one argument for orthography and one for
technology.

The orthography argument is that for proper representation of the Maori
language, use of a macron (over all 5 vowels, upper and lower case) is
required. This is true in many other languages as well. I have no argument
with this.

Interesting side note, that I learned from a linguist at a Unicode
conference: In English, we refer to a "long" vowel by the sound it makes
("mate" as opposed to "mat"). However, in many other languages (apparently
Maori included), a "long" vowel is actually held for a longer period of time.

The site also approaches the problem of entering, storing, and outputting
vowels with macrons, which are combinations that do NOT exist in the Latin 1
character set. Their technique is to replace the umlaut (diaeresis) with a
macron in a specialized font. This in effect creates a customized codepage
(character set), and allows all needed characters to be coded in 8 bits.

This may suffice for localized uses, but it is certainly not portable. I
believe that any development aimed toward the future, especially web page
design, should be focused on Unicode. Note that the vowels needed are all
defined in Unicode. Here they are with their Unicode (hexadecimal and decimal)
values (note that I'm not attempting to actually show the macrons):
  Hex   Decimal
A 0100  256
a 0101  257
E 0112  274
e 0113  275
I 012A  298
i 012B  299
O 014C  332
o 014D  333
U 016A  362
u 016a  363

(These are taken from the Unicode 2 manual, which is also online at
www.unicode.org).

Thus any of these could be displayed in a web page, as a numeric character
entity.

A little experimentation in Word 2000, however, revealed that these are NOT
easy to generate. There appears to be no dead key for a combining
macron. However, the "ChrW" function in Visual Basic did allow me to enter
these characters. Thus, a macro might be called for. Note that ChrW requires a
decimal argument. Thus
   Selection.TypeText Text:="Hello world" + ChrW(256)
produced "Hello world" followed by an A-macron.

Windows codepage 1257 (Baltic Rim) contains all of these. Surprisingly,
though, I could not find these included on any Windows keyboard map.

Finally, note that Mac is not fully Unicode enabled.   

-- 
Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

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