Latin Language

This page describes how to type Latin with long marks/macrons or combined letters æ,œ.

Long Marks and Unicode

Unlike other accent marks (e.g. á, ä), Latin long marks are not a part of the older Latin 1 encoding set used for Spanish, French, German, Italian and other Western European languages, but they are a part of Unicode.

Therefore, they are not supported in every font or software program. Nor are there simple accent codes for these characters. However, programs with basic Unicode support can generally support long marks.

Fonts with Long Marks

The following fonts include long marks in Latin

Windows and Mac Fonts

The fonts Arial Unicode (Windows) and Lucida Grande (Macintosh) include long marks even in the older versions of these fonts

Microsoft Office Fonts

The most recent versions of common Microsoft Office fonts include long marks. The list includes

• Arial
• Calibri
• Cambria
• Comic Sans
• Helvetica
• Palatino
• Times New Roman

Note: If your version of one of the font listed above does not include long marks, make sure you have a recent version of Microsoft Office or Windows installed if possible.

Freeware Fonts

Additional freeware fonts can be downloaded the sites below. These fonts are designed for medieval or ancient scholars and may include specialty characters for some forms of scholarly work.

• Junicode – Includes Runes, Old English characters and medieval characters
• Cardo – Includes ancient Greek and Hebrew and medieval characters
• Quivira – Supports many ancient scripts including Old Italic
• Doulos SIL – Another phonetics font with long vowels
• TITUS Cyberbit – Includes ancient Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Runes and other scripts, but is an older font dating from an older version of Unicode.

Windows Typing Long Marks

Windows Māori Keyboard

Recent versions of Windows include a Maori keyboard utility which allows users to easily type long marks from the keyboard.

Character Map

The Windows Character Map also includes the ability to insert vowels with macrons/long marks.

Windows Word Alt Codes

The following numeric codes work only in Microsoft Word, and you must use the numeric keypad. More detailed instructions
about typing accents with ALT keys are available. 

Word ALT Codes for long vowels

Macintosh OS X Extended Keyboard Codes

For long vowels, you can switch to the the Extended keyboard then type Option+A, then the vowel.
Note: You can also use the Hawaiian or Māori keyboard for macrons.

Unicode Accent Codes for HTML

Unicode Encoding

If you use long marks, Unicode (utf-8) is the required encoding for Web sites. If the following encodings are used instead, you may encounter display problems:

Avoid These

• iso-8859-1 (Latin 1),
• iso-8859-15 (Latin with euro (€) symbol)
• win-1252 (Windows 1)

If possible, you should transition to Unicode.

Language Tags

Language Tags allow browsers and other software to process text more efficiently.

Language Code: la

The HTML Entity Codes

Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you
want to type bōnus with a long O, you would type bōnus.
These numbers are also used with the Windows Word Alt
codes listed above.

NOTE: Your page should declare utf-8 encoding or else the characters may not display in older browsers. Because these are Unicode characters, the formatting may not exactly match that of the surrounding text depending on the browser.

Unicode Entity Codes for long vowels

Links

Freeware Fonts

• Junicode – Includes Runes, Old English characters and medieval characters
• Cardo – Includes ancient Greek and Hebrew and medieval characters
• Quivira – Supports many ancient scripts including Old Italic
• Doulos SIL – Another phonetics font with long vowels
• TITUS Cyberbit – Includes ancient Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Runes and other scripts, but is an older font dating from an older version of Unicode.

Type Macrons (Māori)

• Kupu o te Rā
• Massey University (Windows)
• TypeIt Māori (Online Keyboard)

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