Professor Martin Mueller asks:
 
> Is there a simple way of creating vowels with horizontal bars on
> top to represent long vowels? And is there a way of making it
> appear on web pages?
 
Both Peter Flynn and Tobias Rischer point out the existence of the
&_macr; ISO entities (where _ is one of aAeEiIoOuU). Peter correctly
points out that how you encode a long vowel in your SGML instance is
unconnected with how it appears in print; Tobias correctly points out
that a macron does not represent the semantics you want. Both point out
that you can't easily get a web browser to display such a character.
 
First, allow me to voice a strong opinion against using &_macr;
entities for long vowels. If I understand correctly, they are very
different things. A macron is an over-the-letter bar diacritic that
represents a contraction of a nasal consonant (M or N; others?) after
the vowel. This is a hold-over from pre-printing press days. Thus
I did, wh<abbr expan="en">&emacr;</abbr> it was too late...
[Example is from <bibl><title>The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie</>
by <author>Elizabeth Clinton</>, published in <date>1622</>, page
16</>.]
 
Using an overbar to represent a long vowel, on the other hand, is part
of the International Phonetic Assocation's International Phonetic
Alphabet. It would seem reasonable that the IP Association would have
an entity set for their IP Alphabet, but if they do, I don't know about
it. There are no IP Alphabet entities that I am aware of in the standard
ISO 8879 entity sets, and I did not find any reference to IPA entity
sets on the web.
 
The real TEI expert on this sort of stuff is Harry Gaylord; he reads
this list, but is probably busy at the Technical Review Comittee meeting
in Bergen. The president of the IPA is John Ohala; I have sent him a
copy of this post. I hope that one or both of them will correct any
egregious errors I may have made.
 
Peter then points out, in reference to actually creating the marks on
the page:
 
> TeX has been able to do this trivially for over 15 years.
 
True, but TeX is not alone in this. So has Script, and I bet
half a dozen other batch text formatting systems. And it's not
that the Mac can't produce these characters -- you just have to
install the right IPA font(s). They can be obtained from either
 
    SIL Printing Arts Department - Font Development
    7500 West Camp Wisdom Road
    Dallas, TX 75236
    USA
    214/709-2495
    [log in to unmask]
or
    Linguist's Software, Inc.
    P.O. Box 580
    Edmonds, WA 98020-0580
    USA
    206/775-1130
    [log in to unmask]
 
Acknowlegements: much information from our consulting linguist, Jacque
Russom, and the IPA home page, http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html.
 
-- Syd Bauman, SGML programmer/analyst
   Brown University Women Writers Project
   [log in to unmask]
 
P.S. Peter -- I'd really appreciate a reference to your 'm' with a
     macron.