Christoph, The convention of using a horizontal line to mark an abbreviation, often the omission of m or n, goes back to the middle ages (if not earlier) and was often used in early printed books; apparently it has lived on in some handwriting, to judge from your post. There is no such m-macron character in Unicode, and there will not be since no more precomposed combinations will be added.
I think that U+0305, the combining overscore, is the right thing to use for marking such abbreviations. I would like to get confirmation of this from others on the list just to be sure. The only alternative would be the combining macron, U+0304, which in many fonts would look too short. Furthermore, I at least think of macrons as diacritics that mainly go over vowels. David > I recently learned in <news:de.etc.sprache.deutsch> that > there has been a tradition (in handwritten text more than in > print) of writing "mm" as only one "m" with a macron above. > I can't find any such character in Unicode, just U+1E3F and > U+1E41. You could of course build something similar with > "m"+U+0305 to resemble the look, but that won't become "mm" > (just "m" or "m�") after a conversion to e.g. ISO-8859-1.
