Writing letters with a bar on top - overlines and macrons

Sometimes you may want to place a horizontal bar over a letter — for example, to represent the mean value of x (x̄) in mathematics, or to indicate a long vowel in phonetic transcription.

In typography, this horizontal line is called a macron.
Macrons appear in many writing systems, including the Baltic languages, where they’re part of the regular alphabet.

Letters that already include a macron

Unicode already defines several letters with macrons built in, mostly vowels.
For example:

• The Unicode character 257 represents the letter “ā” (lowercase a with macron).

To find such letters in PopChar:

1. Open PopChar and type the base letter followed by the word “macron” in the search field.
   For example, type “a macron”.
2. PopChar will display all variants of that letter with a macron — uppercase and lowercase.
3. Click the one you want to insert it into your document.

In Helvetica, this will yield these characters:

Tip: Not all fonts include every letter with a macron. If a letter appears in blue, it’s not available in your current font.
Switch to the “Union of All Available Fonts” view to check if any installed font supports it, or see "Find fonts that contain your symbol" for more help.

Creating a custom letter with a macron

Some letter–macron combinations, like x̄, don’t exist as predefined Unicode characters.
In this case, you can create the combination manually using combining characters in PopChar.

Here’s how:

1. Type your base letter (for example, x) in your document.
   We’ll use Arial for this example, since it works well with combining marks.
2. Make sure the insertion point is directly after the letter.
3. In PopChar, select the same font (e.g., Arial).
4. Search for “overline” in PopChar’s search field.

1. In the results, you’ll see a few similar-looking characters — look for the one named “COMBINING OVERLINE.”
2. Click it to insert the character.

The result should look like this:

Tip: The results of this technique depend on the font. It may not work at all in some fonts, or the macron may be misplaced over the letter. You may need to experiment with some fonts in order to get the desired result.

Here are a few fonts in which this technique works well in most applications:

Tip: If the COMBINING OVERLINE character doesn’t align nicely, try using COMBINING MACRON instead.
It’s a bit shorter and can look better over narrow letters like “i”.