Using macrons in Confluence Cloud

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Related article: Using macrons in Jira Cloud

Māori is one of the official languages in New Zealand. In written form, Māori language uses a diacritical mark called a macron, indicating long vowel sounds.  

Like umlauts and Asian characters, you cannot always assume they will display correctly within your tools.

Why are macrons important?

These diacritical marks are more than clothing or an accessory for letters that indicate how a word should be pronounced as the example below shows:

So what do you need to know when using macrons in Confluence Cloud?

You will need to set up your keyboard to be able to type letters with macrons (details here) or use a copy-and-paste technique with the help of the online keyboard maori.typeit.org.

Like with Jira project keys, macrons cannot be used in space keys.

Printing to PDF

Not all font families have support for macrons. If you can see macrons saved in your pages but the letters are missing then you use Export to PDF, follow the instruction here to change font. Roboto is an example of a font family that is Māori macron friendly.

Searching with macrons

The search function in Confluence is not able to return a search for a word when it contains a macron, unless you type the search word using macrons. 

CONFCLOUD-22495 'Allow search feature to ignore accent' has been open since 2011 and has a status of gathering interest.

There are two workarounds:

• add ~ to the end of each search (e.g. "maori ~" should return results for maori and māori)
• add the Excerpt Macro to key pages that use macros. Enter the keywords without macrons into the Excerpt text and select the Hide Excerpted Content parameter (e.g. If "maori" is saved in a hidden Excerpt macro the text will not be visible o the page but the page will show in the search results for both "maori" and "māori".

Page URLs and macrons

Many of us like to use Confluences default page title "pretty" format:

https://confluence.example.com/display/SPACEKEY/Page+Title

Any macrons in your page title will be replaced with "+" signs just like spaces. This means a page called 'Guide to Māori macrons' would look like:

https://confluence.example.com/display/SPACEKEY/Guide+to-M+ori+macrons

 The page ID format will be used if page title contains a URL reserved or unsafe character, such as: % & ? / \ ; " § +, or, if the final character of the page title is of any non-alphanumeric character.

The good news

Space names, page titles, and page content can be saved and displayed in Confluence Cloud without requiring apps or additional steps.

[M Amine]

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