Mini Macroniser Toolkit for Windows

Helps web designers put macrons on long vowels in Māori

Programmer: Chris Hilder

Download version 1.1 537KB (550,565 bytes)

This software is designed for authors who are writing short passages in Māori, or who use occasional Māori words and quotes in their writing. There are more sophisticated solutions for authors writing extensively in Māori.

Long vowels in Māori words are indicated by the long macron.

To use long macrons in your writing it was once necessary to install a Māori font, one that replaced the umlaut with a long macron. While this is still necessary on systems that do not fully support unicode, such as Windows 95 and some older software running on more recent versions of Windows, it is generally no longer necessary. The free Mini Macroniser Toolkit gives you two true type Māori fonts (Times and Arial). These fonts are automatically installed when you install the toolkit. In most cases they can be ignored, but they will be useful when using applications that do not support unicode.

These Māori fonts replace the umlaut characters (ä ë ï ö ü) with long macron characters (ā ē ī ō ū). Once you have installed the Māori fonts, you can type the codes for the umlaut characters and so long as you are using a Māori font they appear with long macrons. (The Alt Key Codes for the umlaut characters, which are long macron characters in a Māori font, are set out in the table below. To type an Alt Key Code, hold the Alt key down while you type the four digit code on the numeric keypad.)

A simpler method is to use the Mini Macroniser, part of the free Mini Macroniser Toolkit. Type the Māori text into the Macroniser's edit panel using double vowels for long vowels, eg "Maaori". Click the Double vowel >> Umlaut button to have the double vowels converted to umlauts. (You can further convert the umlauts to HTML Unicode characters if you are writing HTML.) Copy and paste the macronised text into the document you are writing. To see the macrons remember to select a Māori font.

HTML
If you are creating an HTML page for a web site, umlaut-based macrons will generally appear as umlauts. The solution is to replace all the umlaut characters with special HTML codes that instruct the browser to add long macrons. You can do this automatically with the Mini Macroniser, part of the free Mini Macroniser Toolkit. This facility is useful if you are editing HTML directly, as it generates the correct unicode character commands automatically.

Another issue with web pages is knowing that search engines will be able to find your page. If the search terms contain macrons there is no knowing what type of macronisation will be used. My advice is to play it safe and put four forms of every word that contains macros in the keyword meta tag:-

1. The plain unmacronised form eg: Maori
2. With long vowels indicated by doubling the vowel eg: Maaori
3. With umlauts eg: Mäori
4. With HTML coded long macrons eg: Māori

Here is an example meta tag (showing all four versions of "Māori"):

<meta name="keywords" content="Maori, Maaori, Mäori, M&#257;ori">

Keyword lists containing all four forms of every word in your document that contains a long macron can be automatically generated with the Mini Macroniser, part of the free Mini Macroniser Toolkit.

Table of character codes
This table shows the HTML codes and the Māori font codes:

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