Most Indic scripts are encoded in the Unicode Standard, and as such the letter Ā in those scripts can usually be represented in plain text with a single codepoint. However, if the letter A is used as a consonant or a vowel support, the letter Ā is usually encoded as letter A plus vowel sign Ā. Ā from several modern-use scripts can also be found in legacy encodings, such as ISCII.
