Using a font with diacriticals - How?

Question

I make extensive use of a font called URW Palladio Pali, which is for writing in the Pali language. It includes letters with diacriticals, such as a line over an "A", making it a long vowel. You may be familiar with this from Latin. More familiar is the Spanish palatal "n", written with a tilde (~) over it.
In Windows, I would use the Alt key plus four numbers to get a long A: Alt+0225. I have tried this using the Command, Option, and Control key, and none of them work.
How do I get my Pali diacriticals?

Answer 1

I am beginning to long for the "good old days" with PageMaker!
It would be a very big job to redo all my work in a new font.
I'm sure. Depending on how long you want your efforts to last, you may want to think about doing that work.
A big part of my job is taking old PageMaker publications in old fonts and bringing 'em into the 21st century. I installed and looked at the URW Pali fonts, and saw that the way you're working is going to trap your documents in the 20th century. You may be okay with this - maybe you are only working for print, and you're completely okay with your documents not being in step with contemporary standards, and you don't care if your work dies with you (or you're willing to cede the work of bringing your documents up-to-date to someone else).
Check it out: if I open up InDesign's Glyphs menu (Type -> Glyphs) and mouse over the S-with-dot-below, the little popup informs me that the letter is encoded as "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE." This means that your font of choice is out of step with Unicode, which is the basic standard for font encoding that was developed during the 90s. It means that, should twenty years pass and the URW Palladio font disappear from the Internet, your work would require conversion to Unicode standards for anyone to be able to use it. It makes it very hard to revise or repurpose the text in such documents.
You may not care - in which case you can safely ignore my admonition that you should think hard about tackling that "very big job." I do that "very big job" all the time, when I write a script to convert text set in a noncompliant old font that worked fine in PageMaker for Lao or Amharic or Dari or Tamil or Croatian or what-have-you, into a new font and new encoding that is based on standards and will be accessible for the foreseeable future. It doesn't mean that I have to re-typeset the entire body of work; to the contrary, it means I get to haul PageMaker documents into the twenty-first century, with a minimum of fuss, and perhaps a bit of text reflow here and there.
More than anything else, it means that when I make a PDF of a how-to-use-your-state-sponsored-benefts document for a refugee population, and my client puts it up for download, it's searchable. It means that, should I need to update a document, I don't have to find a translator or typesetter who is capable of working in a particular old-fashioned font. And, most importantly, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and my brains wind up scattered across the roadway (actually, my coworkers frown on my use of that particular hypothetical proposition and insist that I substitute "if I get abducted by aliens tomorrow"), it means that someone else can continue my work without having to have obscure expertise in foreign-language typesetting hacks and workarounds of the early 90s.
Just think about it.