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Me whai wāhi ki ngā mahi Kāwanatanga (Participate in Government)

The new NZ Government Portal went live yesterday. I didn’t actually dig around in there too much right then, because I got immediately diverted with another issue: that of trying to get the macrons on Māori words to show up properly in my browser, and then get them showing up right here.

They’ve chosen to take the better longterm strategy of using the Unicode character sequences rather than buggering about with specially macron-ised fonts – this works on most newer Windows OSs and also MacOSX, but needs a bit of help to work on MacOS 9.

There is an amazing array of Unicode resources available out there, and eventually I found exactly what I was looking for: local Mac Guru Tom Robinson’s test page for Māori Macron characters. Apparently all I had to do was get the Apple Central European fonts off the OS9 install disc and (almost) all is well. However, because the NZ Government portal seems to specify Microsoft Arial in its style sheet (as does half-pie.net!), I’ll need to try and locate a Central European version of that to try and make things look a little nicer.

Another good but more general resource on these sorts of issues is Alan Wood’s Unicode pages; the specific page on the Latin Extended-A character set that is used to generate the macrons is here.