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• • February 22, 2014 at 7:52 pm #67286
    Chris Benge

    Member

    Here in New Zealand, Maori is an official language of the country. Over the past couple of decades its long vowels have increasingly been marked by a macron (bar) over the vowel. OpenType Pro fonts, and increasingly others as well, offer these macronned characters in their glyph sets.

    However, typing Maori text in InDesign is a laborious process, as there seems to be no simple way of assigning a keycode to each of the 5 macronned vowels as we type. So we are left with having to pull up the glyphs panel and scroll to find the right character — or work around the problem by typing the long vowels as a standard keycode which can then be searched and replaced. Very inelegant!

    Can anyone advise an elegant and efficient solution for this problem?

  • February 24, 2014 at 6:19 am #67289
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    can you give some text example. Also the vowels or long-vowels etc.

  • February 24, 2014 at 9:37 am #67295
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Here’s one of my favorite options:
    https://creativepro.com/easy-diacritics-and-other-tough-glyphs.php

    Or:
    https://creativepro.com/type-any-unicode-character-you-want-in-indesign.php

    Plus, I don’t know if Mindsteam or other spelling plug-ins will work, but check out the comments after this blog post:
    https://creativepro.com/let-indesign-add-the-diacritics.php

  • February 25, 2014 at 8:40 am #67325
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Does it not work with a Maori keyboard layout?
    Some info here, a little out of date as regards OS versions: https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~kimihia/maori-keyboard
    from which the OS X info (alt+the vowel) worked for me with CS6, and also here with Safari, assuming the forum allows it: ?????

    Edit: of course, the forum doesn’t support it (or many other unicode characters – why not?). They were typed in OK.

  • May 15, 2014 at 9:10 am #67291
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    Windows or Mac? If the former, have you tried Microsoft’s Maori input system described here? If Mac, perhaps SIL’s <a
    href=”https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele”>Ukelele would let you customize input.

    There is also Kahrel’s Compose javascript, though he warns this is better for multi-lingual work rather than typing in a particular language.

    I confess I have not tried either of the keyboard-driver fixes, though I type a fair amount of macron vowels (for romanizing Japanese or for Chinese pinyin tones). Often I add a digit “one” after the vowel which I later search-and-replace — as you say, inelegant. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using MS Word’s auto-correct to automate the replacement, but never actually gotten that far.

    David

  • May 15, 2014 at 9:36 am #68448
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    This thread reprints my answer from February as if I made it today, when in fact I wrote a different answer today to a different thread, namely, the one Andy Mcgroarty launched yesterday on applying diacritics.

    David

  • May 15, 2014 at 9:50 am #68450
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Sorry for the weirdness, David G! Your February forum post (shown above) got stuck in the system and we were able to break it free and get it posted today. I emailed you off list about your other post today.

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