For information about the use of macrons in Wise Group documents, check out the Wise Group writing style guide.
If you regularly write in Māori on your computer, you may need to use some additional Māori characters – ā, Ā, ē, Ē, ī, Ī, ō, Ō, ū, Ū – which aren’t easily available on a standard English keyboard.
There are a number of ways to insert these characters, but the easiest by far is to make a small change to a setting on your PC that allows special key combinations for these characters.
1. Make sure you have the right keyboard installed:
- Follow the Adding the Aotearoa keyboard to Windows 11 guide.
- Or for a Mac, follow these instructions, below.
2. Insert macron characters into your documents.
When using the Aotearoa keyboard, everything about your keyboard remains the same, except for a few special key combinations. For the most part, your ability to write or spell check in English will be unaffected.
To type an uppercase macron character:
- Press the tilde key (~) – generally found to the left of the number 1 key.
- Press and hold the shift key.
- Press the appropriate character. The character will be replaced with the macron equivalent.
To type a lowercase macron character:
- Press the tilde key (~) – generally found to the left of the number 1 key.
- Press the appropriate character. The character will be replaced with the macron equivalent.
Note, macrons will only appear on vowel characters.
Common issues
I’m using the key combinations to get the macron characters but it’s not working?
Check that you’re using the right keyboard by clicking the language icon (normally ENG) in the system tray and choosing an option that shows NZ Aotearoa.
I don’t see the NZ Aotearoa option.
The right keyboard may not be installed. You may have switched computers or the settings may not have saved. Repeat the setup process and try again.
When I write Māori words in my documents, spell checker warns me.
Naturally, Māori words don’t form a part of the English dictionary and so those words will be marked as a potential mistake. The easiest solution is to right-click the Māori word and choose Add to dictionary. From this point on, those words will be considered a part of your custom English dictionary. Note, this only applies to your computer. If you distribute your document to others, those Maori words will appear as incorrect for those authors.
Some Māori words can be written with different macron combinations. How will Microsoft Word know when I’ve used the right one?
You can install the language pack for Word here. This will add the ability for Word to proof in Māori.
To add the Māori Keyboard onto a Mac:
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Click on the Apple logo in the top left and choose System Preferences
-
Click Language & Region
-
Click Keyboard Preferences
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Click the + icon and find Māori in the list.
-
Click Add
You can easily switch between keyboard languages by clicking on the flag in the top right menu bar.
To type a vowel with a macron on a Mac, hold down Alt / Option and then the vowel. You can also do this in conjunction with the Shift key to type an uppercase vowel.
Comments
just be aware that you need to call IS to authorise your download of the language pack for te reo māori, an easy fix though...
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