Need quick way to insert macrons. InDesign, OS X.

[Anita Life]

Hi,

I need to use a lot of macrons in several long documents. While OS X
fonts have the macron, as near as I can tell it involves opening the
glyph window, selecting the macron, pasting it in, and then kerning like
mad so that it sits on top of the character.

I am sure there has to be an easier way (something similar to adding the
tilde or circumflex) but I have not been able to find it.

Any help would be appreciated.

(I need to do this a lot, so doing it once and cutting and pasting as
required is not really an option. It would multiply the production time
of each document by ten.)

Thanks in advance

GB

[William F. Adams]

The proper way to do this is install a foreign language, or create a custom
keyboard which maps the macron and has fonts which have characters w/ it
properly set, then use that to typeset it.

Alternately, how is the need for the macron indicated? If it's already in the
file, you should be able to set one kerned macron in the desired font for each
character it's needed, export that as InDesign tagged text (I forget what this
is called exactly but you'll see it in the export dialog file type drop down),
flow your text in, export it as InDesign tagged text, then do a global search
and replace for each indicated character.

William

[Marek Williams]

Post by Anita Life
I need to use a lot of macrons in several long documents. While OS X
fonts have the macron, as near as I can tell it involves opening the
glyph window, selecting the macron, pasting it in, and then kerning like
mad so that it sits on top of the character.
I am sure there has to be an easier way (something similar to adding the
tilde or circumflex) but I have not been able to find it.

When you type a vowel with an accent your program selects a different
character in the font. It does not select the regular vowel and then
kern an accent over the top of it. What you need is a font that has
the vowels with the macrons. The only fonts I know of that come with
this are the Adobe Pro series OpenType fonts. I just checked and
Warnock Pro has a, e, i, o and u with macrons, also the capitals.

Post by Anita Life
(I need to do this a lot, so doing it once and cutting and pasting as
required is not really an option. It would multiply the production time
of each document by ten.)

If the program is Unicode-aware, then you should be able to insert the
vowel with the macron by some kind of keyboard command. Or perhaps you
can do it with PopChar.

--
Bogus e-mail address, but I read this newsgroup regularly, so reply here.

[Andreas Prilop]

Post by Marek Williams
What you need is a font that has
the vowels with the macrons. The only fonts I know of that come with
this are the Adobe Pro series OpenType fonts.

Vowels with macron are also included in the following character sets
and corresponding fonts:
- Mac Central European (MacCE)
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/central-european.mac>

- ISO-8859-13 (ISO Baltic)
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/baltic.html13>

- Windows-1257 (cp1257)
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/baltic.win>

See <http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/central-european.html>
for sources of Central European / Baltic fonts.

[Anita Life]

In article

Post by Anita Life
I need to use a lot of macrons

Very useful replies. Thanks to all who responded.

AGB