Keyboarding macrons for Te Reo

In Aotearoa there are three official languages: English, sign and Māori. In Te Reo Māori, we indicate how long the vowel - the 'standard' English five of a e i o u - is by using a diacritical - in this case, a macron. Some of us will put in Microsoft Office auto-corrects so that a word keyed in without a macron will correct to a word with a macron: others will simply copy the word from a repository to ensure that the Reo is correct.

However, there is a slightly easier way (and it is only slightly easier): we can set up a Māori keyboard (Deitsch, 2021). What we do is:

1. Click on the language icon on our taskbar (e.g. "ENG"), selecting "Language Preferences" from the pop-up menu
2. Under the "Preferred languages" area, select "Add a language" and key in "Maori". Select the Te Reo Māori option
3. Then click "Next" and "Install" (Deitsch, 2021).

Once we have installed the Māori language option, we can then switch between keyboards by clicking on the taskbar language to switch to Te Reo Māori (i.e. change from "ENG" to "MRI"). And from there, we can create our macron vowels by keying the "`", or the grave diacritical key (which is the lower case option on the tilde key), letting go, then keying our vowel (Deitsch, 2021). 

So to restate with an example: key `then a = ā

Deitsch (2021) also notes that sometimes when switching between keyboards, the macron may take two goes to action. We just need to bear with it. 

A solution of sorts: and if anyone has any other, truly easier solutions, I would love to hear them!

Sam

References:

Deitsch, R. (2021, September 10). How To Type Latin Macrons (The Easy Way). Livia. https://booksnbackpacks.com/how-to-type-latin-macrons/