If you have ever tried to order something personalised with a name like Ngāwhakamarino on it, you will know the two ways it usually goes wrong. Either the macron quietly disappears somewhere between the order form and the product, or the name is too long for the box and you are asked to shorten it.
Neither of those is a hard problem. They’re both just decisions somebody made once and never revisited. We revisited ours, and this is what changed.
The macron is part of the spelling
A macron — the tohutō, the bar over a vowel — marks a long vowel, and it changes the word. Keke is cake; kēkē is armpit. Matua is a parent; mātua is parents. Dropping it isn’t a typographic shortcut, it’s a misspelling, in the same way that dropping the dot off an i would be.
It gets dropped anyway, constantly, and usually for a boring technical reason: the typeface being used doesn’t contain the macronised letters, so the software substitutes something or silently strips them.
Every font we offer carries every macron, upper and lower case: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, Ā, Ē, Ī, Ō, Ū. All ten of them. That is checked by an automated test rather than by someone having looked once, because “we checked at the time” is exactly how a font update loses a character six months later.
We assumed macrons were the problem. They weren’t.
When we started measuring which names actually failed to print, the obvious suspect was the macron: an extra mark floating above a letter, with a gap between it and the letter it belongs to, in a process that builds the plate by growing the letters outwards until they fuse into one solid shape. It looked like the kind of thing that would come off in the post.
It isn’t. We built the same names with and without their macrons — Tūmatauenga against Tumatauenga, Māori against Maori — and the plate came out just as solid either way. The bar sits close enough to the vowel that it fuses into the same body as everything else. The suspicion was reasonable and it was wrong, which is why we measured instead of guessing.
The actual problem was length, and it had a dull fix
Te reo Māori names are routinely longer than English ones. Te Rangiwhakaahu is sixteen characters. Ngāwhakamarino is fourteen. Our character limit was twenty-four, which sounds generous until you notice that a character count is the wrong tool entirely: it knows nothing about the typeface, so it refuses a short name set in a wide face and accepts a long one in a narrow face that won’t actually fit.
What was really binding was the plate. Making it wider didn’t help on its own — counter-intuitively, it made things worse, because a wider plate means less shrinking, which means bigger letters, which means bigger gaps between them, which means the plate stops being one connected piece and arrives in bits.
The fix was the border: the distance the letters are grown outwards before they fuse. At 2mm, six of our seventy test combinations came apart. At 2.5mm, two did. At 3mm, none of them did — and with that border in place the plate could go out to 120mm wide with every test name still building as one solid piece.
So: 3mm border, 120mm plate, and a character limit raised to 32 — loose enough that it is no longer the thing stopping you.
What happens with a really long name
The letters shrink to fit, rather than the name being refused. There’s a floor: below a 6mm cap height the letters stop being legible at arm’s length, and at that point we say so instead of printing something unreadable. In practice almost everything fits, and what comes out is a longer, lower charm rather than a smaller one.
The preview on the product page is the actual model that goes to the printer, at the actual size, so you can see what a long name turns into before you pay for it. It’s worth typing the full spelling in and looking, rather than assuming it’ll be trimmed.
If a font refuses your name
Occasionally it will. A light or script typeface can produce a stroke so thin, at the size your name needs to be, that the plate would be fragile or wouldn’t hold together at all — and the engine refuses rather than taking the money. Pick a heavier face and it will build. That’s a real constraint of printing a name as a solid object rather than printing ink onto one, and we’d rather it stop at the preview than at your letterbox.
Please use the full spelling
You don’t need to ask whether we can do macrons, and you don’t need to pre-trim a name to make it fit. Type it the way it’s spelt. That’s the whole point of the last round of work.