Typing Hawaiian characters on your keyboard

When I first started trying to type the ʻokina (  ʻ  ) and kahakō (  ¯  ) on my keyboard it was a PITA. Here I show various ways I've found to do this.

First, just copy the character you want from my list below and paste it into your own document. (There is a better way for web pages, using HTML entities, see lower down this page).

Ā     ā     Ē     ē     Ī     ī      Ō     ō     Ū     ū

In Gedit and other text editors, also for example in the Thunderbird emailer.:

Using the UNICODE character for that character:

Kahakō:

Press ctrl-shift-u (to hop into unicode mode, the letter u with an underline appears), then for example if you want an a with a kahakō ( ā ) type 101 and hit CR. This results in the underlined u disappearing and an ā being inserted.

ʻOkina:

When composing for the web:

To ensure that the characters display correctly in all browsers make sure your head section includes the declaration
<meta charset="utf-8"/ >

Kahakō:

HTML has a character entity for letters with their Kahakō, and for the ʻOkina. Instead of typing the actual letter, use the entity in your HTML. This ensures compatability across all browsers. Your page should declare utf-8 (Unicode) encoding or else the characters may not display in older browsers.

ʻOkina:

In Microsoft's Word

These only work in the numeric keypad. (And as usual with Microsoft, does not work in all versions of Word. (Go figure!))

Ā ALT+0256
Ē ALT+0274
Ī ALT+0298
Ō ALT+0332
Ū ALT+0362
ā ALT+0257
ē ALT+0275
ī ALT+0299
ō ALT+0333
ū ALT+0363

There is good article on adding the Hawaiian keyboard to Windows, here

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