Many people complain they that have trouble getting the Māori diacritics (the ꞌamata and the macrons) on their computer. It's nowhere near as difficult as it once was now that we have the unicode standard but it can be a little bit tricky to get the hang of. I encourage you all to try to get your digital devices set up to produce and display these symbols easily. On this page you will find various solutions for typing the diacritcs on your digital device, including a Cook Islands Māori keyboard for Windows and a Cook Islands Māori keyboard for Mac.

I have made this Cook Islands Māori keyboard for Windows.

Here are some links to sites that explain some other approches to setting up the Māori diacritics on Windows. 

New Zealand Māori (no specific ꞌamata included but you can still use the apostrophe)

Hawaiian (ʻokina is included, and you can still use the apostrophe)

A Generic "Polynesian" Keyboard to download from Huri Translation (uses the apostrophe) 

On a Mac running 10.7 or later, all you need to do to get the macrons is hold down the vowel see what happens.

You can also set up your system so that the macrons and the ꞌamata are accessable using alt+vowel and alt+'.

Here is a link explaining how you select an "input language" generally (this will work for earlier versions os OSX as well)

http://www.wikihow.com/Change-the-Keyboard-Language-of-a-Mac

There is a Māori option and a Hawaiian option preloaded into the system,and either of those will give you the macrons and the ꞌokina and the apostrophe.

I have built a C.I. Māori input key board that gives you the macrons, the Saltillo character as well as the ꞌokina and the apostrophe. I used Ukelele to build it. Using this layout the macrons are accessible by alt+Vowel and the Saltillo is accessable by alt+: and the ʻokina is accesable by alt+'. The apostrophe is in the usual place.

The macrons are accesible in iOS in any of the English keyboards by holding down the vowel. There is a Hawaiian keyboard that has the ʻokina redily accessible but I find this a little annoying because it also has Hawaiian auto correct and this causes me a bit of bother :).

Here are some instructions 

Macron are available in most modern fonts so they shouldn't pose too much of a problem.

The ꞌamata is potentially a little more tricky. The first problem is that there is not yet any agreement as to which character should be used to represent the glottal stop. There are a number of different characters used in various publications.  The second problem is that some systems and/or set ups have difficulty displaying some of the characters that we use.

I reccomend that if you can, you should use the Saltillo. The Saltillo had two major advantages:

1: It visually breaks up the words less than the curved characters do.

2: It is treated as a letter rather than as a diacritic by software so you can use it in spread sheets (unlike the straight apostrophe).

It has one major disadvantage and that is; that is is not part of the majority of fonts at this time. It is in the "Latin Extended D" set of unicode characters and many fonts do not include this character set. This means that you have to make sure you are using a font that is FULLY unicode compliant.

Fonts that support the Saltillo character

If you can't manage to use the Saltillo you should use any of the other options.

The straight apostrophe looks a lot like the Saltillo as long as it doesn't get curved by the font that you use or by "smart quotes". It can also cause problems if it occurs word initially (at the beginning of a word) in some applications such as spreadsheets. This is because it is not being treated as a "letter" but as a punctuation mark.

The ʻokina is the offical character used in Hawaiin and Tongan and is sometimes used in Cook Islands Māori. It is currently supported by more fonts than the Saltillo but the curved shape that is has makes text that uses the ʻokina to write the ꞌamata harder to read for some people.

The single left quotation mark displays differently depending on the font and the "smart quote" settings which can be problematic.

If you having trouble display the charcters in your web browser this site should help.