How do I type an x-bar symbol on a Mac?

AndyGrey wrote:

How do I type an x-bar symbol on a Mac?

You can use the ABC Extended input source for this. Once activated from system prefs/keyboard/input sources and chosen in the "flag" menu the top right of the screen, you can add a bar to any character by typing option-shift a after it. x̄

A list of the shortcuts is at

http://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/mac/codemacext/

Also you can use the Character Viewer. Go to the gear wheel at top left, choose customize, add Unicode, and use one of the Combining Diacritics in the 0300 range, 0304 or 0305.

It will probably look better in some fonts than in others.

If you do lots of such work, probably better to use an Equation Editor.

It has to be present in the standard fonts, just not easily accessible, because using the HTML code or copying from an existing appearance on a web page as here:

x̅

displays it (and it can be copied into TextEdit in plain text mode): if it were a character not present in the font it would presumably show the 'null' character we see here sometimes. When I tried it in a word processor the character is present in Helvetica, Arial, Geneva and Lucida Grande (apparently the font used here) but seems to default to one of those in most other fonts.

Tom has provided a method of accessing it, though given its complexity I would have thought it simpler to keep a copy available and copy-and-paste as required.

I thought they were essentially put together by the text rendering routines of the app or OS.

It depends on what the person creating the font feels like doing. They can choose to fill each position with actual outlines, or can create a glyph as alias links within the font. I know I have quite a few like that, but didn't know how long it would take me to find one, so I created a fake example, as seen next.

The egrave spot appears gray against a white background rather than black. When you see that in FontLab Studio, it means alias links were used to create the glyph by pointing that cell to both the normal e and grave cells. Nothing is really there. Your apps have to understand the links to display the cell how it looks. Not that this is an issue. This type of glyph creation has been in use for decades.

From the source view of this page, the fonts in use by the forums are San Francisco Pro and Myriad Pro.

fonts?family=Myriad+Set+Pro

fonts?families=SF+Pro,v1

There is no SF Pro included with the OS to check for the existence of an X with a macron over it. The example of Myriad Pro I have also has no such character. But that doesn't mean the version Apple is using as a web font doesn't.

I can only assume your code for combining diacritics with another glyph is what's creating it. i.e, you're manually creating a glyph that otherwise doesn't exist in the font.

I honestly don't know how you ever found the time to learn this much about languages, their associated keyboard layouts, and the millions of keystrokes needed to produce xxx. You are phenomenal at it!

My impression is that both fonts and rendering engines can in practice often create such composite characters on the fly out of their components. There are ways for the font author to put marks or anchors on individual parts to make the combination look right if the default is too ugly. Apple's Lucida Grande for example can produce lots of random combinations like the one shown below.

I can see no way of typing it, and it doesn't appear in the Character Viewer (though it is available in HTML as x̄ and can be displayed on a Mac). I've put out a call for someome who knows more about fonts than I do to help, but in the meantime I can only suggest copying it from here and pasting it in:

x̅

There seems to be a Unicode character, so it's a question of how to access it.

It also isn't easy to find a font that even includes an x with a macron over it. I checked over 40 fonts installed with the Mac, and not one of them had such a glyph. Lots of them with A I E G and other letters, but not X.

Kurt Lang wrote:

It also isn't easy to find a font that even includes an x with a macron over it.

Do characters like that without precomposed Unicode values normally have "glyphs" in fonts? I thought they were essentially put together by the text rendering routines of the app or OS.

Haha! 😄 That's using the whole runway!

I've never taken the time to figure out to do that because I've never needed to. One of these days…