Fonts
Viewing macrons
Christchurch City Libraries is following the recomendations of Te Puni Kokiri and the Māori Language Commission to use macrons to indicate a long vowel in the Māori language.
We have made the decision to display macrons on our site using an internationally standard character set called Unicode. Unicode was developed to standardise how characters are displayed across multiple languages and alphabets. We believe that Unicode provides the most robust, and the best long-term solution for displaying macrons on the web.
How it works
If your operating system is either:
- Windows 95 or later, or
- Mac OS 8 or above,
and your Internet Browser is version 4.0 or above, then the macronised vowels should display correctly. If they don't you need to get Unicode-compliant fonts.
If your browser or operating system does not fall within those specifications, you will be shown a page where the macronised vowels are replaced with a question mark (?). You should consider updating your browser to a more up to date version.
Getting a Unicode-compliant font
If you have followed the above instructions, but are still having problems, it may be that you do not have any Unicode-compliant fonts installed on your system, or that the fonts installed are Unicode-compliant but do not contain macronised vowels as part of the fonts' character sets.
Recent versions of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows 98 and most releases of Windows 95) include core fonts like Arial and Times New Roman that are Unicode-compliant.
Although Microsoft has discontinued its free fonts programme, recent versions of the Windows core fonts are available via the Internet Archive. You can download, at
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/default.aspx
For use of our site download Arial and Verdana.
