Diacritical
marks are an important part of the
Hawaiian language, affecting both the pronounciation and the
meaning of particular words.
Webmasters often resort to using apostrophes
(') instead of okinas (‘),
and umlauts or circumflexes (eg. ä or â)
instead of macrons (ā). Sometimes they even require that
you download or purchase special font packages. The following
table shows the necessary
"escape characters" for including
Hawaiian
text
into the HTML code of
your website.
Code
|
Code
|
||
Ā
|
Ā
|
ā
|
ā
|
Ē
|
Ē
|
ē
|
ē
|
Ī
|
Ī
|
ī
|
ī
|
Ō
|
Ō
|
ō
|
ō
|
Ū
|
Ū
|
ū
|
ū
|
‘
|
‘
|
Diacritical marks may appear differently depending on what font you use. The following table shows the appearance of the marks in various web-safe fonts.
Font |
sample
text |
| Arial | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Andale Mono | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Comic sans | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Courier New | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Georgia | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Helvetica | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Impact | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Palatino | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Times New Roman | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Trebuchet | ‘ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Verdana | ‘ ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū |
| Webdings | ‘Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū ē ī ō ū |
Using diacritical marks will affect how people are able to find your site using a search engine. For example, users searching for Koolaupoko on Google might not find Ko‘olaupoko.
. Notes:Google will find sites using an okina even when users search using an apostrophe (e.g. searching for He'eia WILL find He‘eia). And searching for "He‘eia" (in quotes, using the code for an okina) is identical to searching for He'eia (with an apostrophe).
For these characters to display properly, users must have either Netscape or Internet Explorer version 4 or higher. Support for other browsers is unknown at the present time. If they aren't showing up properly, make sure that your page includes the following tag:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">