[XeTeX] XeTeX segmentation faults

[Musa Furber]

On 16 Jun 2004, at 22:51, Somadevah at aol.com wrote:

>
>  In a message dated 16/6/04 6:18:56 pm, musaf at runbox.com writes:
>
>>  Is there anything I can do about where XeTeX places the dot when I 
>> use
>>  \d{H} ? When I used Hoefler through pdflatex, the dot is placed 
>> exactly
>>  where it should be. XeTeX places it far lower.
>
>  Dear Musa,
>
>  I had a similar problem and added the following code to the preamble 
> (after setting up Hoefler or some OTF font).
>
>  %
>  %Diatop lets you put one character (or accent) above another
>
> [...snip...]

Excellent! Just what I needed.

>  For Hoefler I had to add the value of  \hskip.125em to the 
> redefinition of \d{} this is not necessary for OTF fonts I have tried.

For Hoefler Italic, \hskip -.125em (negative) nudges the dot to a nice 
place.

>  But as Jonathan has said, it is not advisable to carry on doing this 
> sort of thing, it is far better to find Unicode fonts which support 
> all of the characters needed or, as far as this is not illegal, 
> produce one's own AAT version of the font.
>
>  Also, this sort of thing does not produce properly searchable utf8 
> PDF files!!!

A monolithic solution such as Unicode is my preference, as well. 
Unfortunately, the Arabic transliteration scheme currently popular in 
the US and UK do not fit well with most Unicode fonts. Gentium and 
TITUS Cyberbit have all of the required glyphs.

At least with TeX it is clear what is going on. Using spacing and 
kerning to produce the same thing in Word is terrible.

>  Hope this helps,

Very much so.

When I think of all the hours spent fighting with word processing 
software, the investment to learn TeX looks like a bargain.

Regards,
Musa