In some fonts, especially fonts from over a decade ago, the macron diacritical glyph is really, really wide, sometimes almost twice the length of a tilde. Often the stroke seems too thin compared to the rest of the accents.
Georgia is an example where the regular macron looks like a normal macron and the combining macron is long & thin.
What's the deal with skinny, wide macrons?
Maybe they just recycled an overline:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overline
What Unicode value are you looking at as the combining macron?
It's off topic, I know, but Wide-Ass Macrons would be a great name for a band.
@John 0304
My mistake: Georgia has a regular macron. I think I figured out the problem. Lots of early 90's fonts didn't contain macronized letters so there may have been less likely to require a properly designed macron. That might be why there's sometimes an overscore in the macron (02C9) position.
I suspect you'll also find that a lot of those overscore glyphs are identical across fonts: the character was treated as a generic line.
I get the photo joke
Well played mon ami
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