2010-04-12

Microsoft Word: add overline to a character

Underlining in Microsoft Word is trivial (CTRL-U), but adding a overline is hard. Most people would resort to using equations, which is slow to render, and may have different font, spacing, and linespacing with the surrounding text. Here's a text-based way of doing this:
  1. Press CTRL+F9 to insert field braces.
  2. Enter EQ \o(W,¯) and delete any extra spaces in the field. The overscore character can be entered by holding down ALT and typing 0175.
  3. Press SHIFT+F9 to show the results of the field code.
  4. If the overline is too wide or narrow, press SHIFT+F9 to show the field code again and select the overscore character.
  5. Press Ctrl-D to edit font properties for the overscore character.
  6. Change to the character spacing tab, adjust the font scale (eg, 150% if we want to overline the character W), and click Ok.
  7. Press SHIFT+F9 to show the results of the field code. Iterate if necessary.