Chinese (Pinyin) Tone Marks on Macintosh

Installation (Mac OS 10.9, but other recent systems are the same)

1. System Preferences => Keyboard (not Languages) => Input Sources. (The “Keyboard” panel controls how you enter text; the “Languages” panel controls how text is spell-checked, hyphenated, etc.)
2. Click + and in the window that opens add U.S. Extended. After clicking “Add”, make sure U.S. Extended shows up in the list of input sources now available to your system.
3. Now you can click the regular U.S. keyboard (not extended) and remove it from the list using -.

How to generate from the keyboard

• “macron” (tone 1): option-a followed by vowel. option-a a: ā, option-a e: ē, etc.
• “acute” (tone 2): option-e followed by vowel. option-e i: í, option-e o: ó, etc.
• “caron” (tone 3): option-v followed by vowel. option-v u: ǔ, option-v a: ǎ, etc. Note: do not use a breve, which looks like this: ŭ, ă, ü̆, etc. (See comment below on ü̆.)
• “grave” (tone 4): option-backtick followed by vowel. option-backtick e: è, option-backtick i: ì, etc.

This works with capitals and n, too: option-a I: Ī, option-e U: Ú, option-backtick n: ǹ, etc.

Note that to get ü (u-umlaut) with a tone-mark, use v. So option-v v: ǚ, option-a v: ǖ, option-a V: Ǖ, etc.

And note that some combining Unicode forms will not display correctly everywhere — a case in point is ü̆, above, which appears as two discrete characters on some pages in Firefox (v. 31.0) but not in Chrome (v. 37.0.2062.120).

More information

There are lists of many more U.S. Extended keyboard accent codes at this Penn State site (accessed 20140914).

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