If you wish to insert vowels used in Latin in a document, such as a Microsoft Word or WordPad document, on a Microsoft Windows system to indicate vowel length, i.e., whether the vowel should be pronounced as a long or short vowel, you can use the Unicode values shown in the table below — Unicode is an encoding standard for characters in most of the world's writing systems. For Latin, a macron, which is a diacritic mark, is placed above the letter to indicate a long vowel. Sometimes a breve may also be used to indicate a short vowel. In addition to the Unicode codes, the corresponding Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) code is listed as well for displaying the characters in a web page.
To insert the characters using a Windows keyboard on a system running the
Microsoft Windows operating system, type the numeric code (the numbers are
hexadecimal numbers so
"A" through "F" represent the numbers 10 through 15) and then hit Alt-x,
i.e., hit the "Alt" and "x" keys simultaneously, after entering the numeric
code. Note, you needed to have a space before the number you enter, otherwise
if you attempt to put "ē" in "fēmina," by typing "f" with "0113"
immediately after it, the "f0113" will be replaced with a small box with a
question mark within it. So place a space after the "f," type
0113, hit Alt-x, then when ē appears, remove
the space before it. Also note that though Microsoft Word supports this
method of entering vowels with a diacritic mark in a document not all
Microsoft Office
applications allow you to enter Unicode characters by this
method. E.g., for
Microsoft Powerpoint, you will need to use the
Character Map method of entering such characters, instead.
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