The following characters (and many more) are part
of the latest version of the standard Times font and
most other fonts that come with Mac's OS 8.5 and 9.

Ė Ő ĺ ķ Ł ł Ń ń Ņ ņ Ň ň ř Ę ē ė č Ē ą Ā ī ź

You will notice that these fonts now also include the o-
and u-macron characters needed for the Hepburn system:
Ō [ Ō ]
ō [ ō ]
Ū [ Ū ]
ū [ ū ]

Unfortunately, I think there is no Web browser that
displays the following o- and u-breves (needed for
McCune-Reischauer) intact. This is just a question
of a few months.
Ŏ [ Ŏ ]
ŏ [ ŏ ]
Ŭ [ Ŭ ]
ŭ [ ŭ ]

But please note that these characters are actually
part of the new version of Times and other standard
fonts! Later this year we will certainly see more
Unicode savvy application programs that will allow us
to make full use of these characters. And Microsoft's
"Office 2000" already includes a huge single font,
called "Arial Unicode MS," that includes Unicode (ISO 10646) encoded glyphs for 23 languages -- including Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and special characters needed for transcription: see Office 2000 info. If you like to have a look to what exactly is in your Mac or Windows fonts -- most "font viewers" only show you the first 255 glyphs -- you may want to download a demo version of FontLab (Mac + PC). Also, Apple most recently made their very own development font tools available for free.

This Web page uses UTF-8 format. Current software uses 7 or 8 bit encoding of characters. Unicode uses 16 bits. For current systems we need a work-around. Unicode can be translated into sequences of 7 bit or 8 bit encodings that allow many current and old systems to interchange or transparently pass these documents without loss of content. The most popular version of this translation mechanism in use is UTF-8 (Universal character set Translation Format, 8-bit form.) This format uses variable lengths of the current standard single-byte characters to represent Unicode character code points.

Frank Hoffmann - 2/13/2000