aa_macro processes, and uses, the English language based ASCII character set. In particular, the one-byte length codes from 0x0A to 0x7F. Characters outside the ASCII character set can (must) be represented by constructs within the generated output, such as &#code; in HTML.
For instance, the HTML code for the checkmark character is ✓ so one might proceed as follows:
ASCII is a compatible subset of UTF-8 .
aa_macro Considers an end-of-line to be a single 0x0A (line feed) character, in conformance with linux and OS X / MacOS text content conventions. In particular, output suppression of newlines flagged with two trailing spaces will fail if an 0x0A is preceded by an 0x0D (return) character.