Is it possible to enter macron (ā) and caron (ǎ) diacritics with USA international keyboard?

Question

I know how it is possible to enter acute (á), grave (à), circumflex (â), and tilde (ã) diacritics with US international keyboard. You just enter one of the symbols ('`^~) and then a vowel.

Is it possible to enter macron (ā) and caron (ǎ) also some similar way?

What is the simplest way to enter these diacritics?

Answer 1

Not directly, no. As you can see from Microsoft's keyboard layout animation, hyperlinked below, there's no dead key combination for macron or caron.

In the worst case you can probably resort to Alt+numeric codes

— From http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/psu/gotunicode/macron.html

Despite the caption these work in several programs and several versions of Windows (I tried in Vista WordPad)

The people at Wikipedia have collected a set of third-party keyboard layouts and utilities for Windows that they can use for writing macrons in Wikipedia articles.

Other methods I have seen mentioned for characters not in the keyboard:

• Install and Select an Input Method Editor(IME) for the language needed.
• Use AutoHotKey or similar program
• Use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator

See also

• How to type pinyin text with tone marks in Windows?

Further reading

• Microsoft corporation. Animated US International keyboard layout. Go Global Developer Center .
• Microsoft corporation (2010-12-01). How to use the United States-International keyboard layout in Windows 7, in Windows Vista, and in Windows XP. 306560. Microsoft Knowledgebase.
• Wikipedia contributors (2011). Help:Macrons. Wikipedia Help.

Answer 2

As an aside only, because I do not know the answer for Windows: I have dead accents for macron and caron on my Linux keyboard, they are placed on the 3 and . keys for US International on Linux.

I also have them on my Colemak keyboard (both for X and for Windows, of course) on the m (for macron) and h (for háček) keys. I recommend this layout anyway, but it get ever more off-topic.