Finding fonts that have macrons

Kia ora.

Te Reo Māori is the indigenous language of Aotearoa, New Zealand and one of three official languages of the nation. Its use is increasing in professional and everyday life. As a designer that means designing with fonts that can accommodate macrons as they are an integral part of the language.

I’m going to share some simple ways to find some macron enabled fonts to use in your designs.

I’ve made a quick video of some of the ways here.

Google Fonts

This a great resource of all of the typefaces listed in the Google Fonts directory are open source. More info about the licence here.

On the home page you can add a word with macrons under ‘custom’ in the search bar. You can then see if the fonts available have macrons. Another option is to select ‘Latin Extended’ in the ‘Language’ button list. This should exclude most fonts that don’t have macrons.

Adobe Fonts (Typekit)

If you’re using Creative Cloud you’ll know you can access Adobe Fonts. When searching in Adobe Fonts you can paste a word with macrons into the ‘Sample Text’ window. This will show a range of fonts and the ones that do not support macrons will have a crossed box replacing the macronised letters.

If you’re already in Indesign or Illustrator you can add or check whether the font you’re using has macrons by going to Window>Type>Glyphs and selecting ‘Entire Font’ in the ‘Select’ window. Scroll through to see if there are macrons. Double clicking on any of the letters will add them into a text box you have open.

Canva

 

If you’re using Canva, select a template or one of your existing designs. In a typebox paste a word containing a macron. With that typebox selected you can click on the typeface button in the top left of the editing banner which will open a window of different fonts. Most of the popular fonts accommodated macrons when I checked them. If they don’t there is a basic default font used.

It’s so great there are many macron enabled font options out there which makes it easier for designers to do the right thing! Here are a couple of other resources that I’ve also found useful.

Other useful resources:

• How to use te Reo Māori on your computer

• Reo Māori Resources

Ka pai!