[XeTeX] access to composite characters

[Jonathan Kew]

On 2 Nov 2005, at 3:23 am, musa furber wrote:

> On Nov 2, 2005, at 12:53 AM, Will Robertson wrote:
>
>> 01/11/2005, 11pm - Malte Rosenau wrote:
>>
>>> what's the best way to typeset latin unicode characters like ?  
>>> with XeTeX? The OTF font I'm currently using does not contain the  
>>> glyph, so how can I fake it? Is there a recommended way to  
>>> declare unicode characters similiarly to the definitions for  
>>> composite characters in t1enc.def???
>>
>> Hi Malte,
>>
>> The character you're after didn't turn up in my mail reader :) but  
>> if you're after fancy accents and so on, then check out Ross  
>> Moore's xunicode package. I suspect it'll do what you want.
>>
>> Sorry my information is a little brief...
>>
>
> If his font does not contain the actual glyph, is this really doing  
> to help? Loading xunicode will not get xelatex to render  
> "ṭḥīṣ" since those glyphs are missing in the default font.

Right. To give suggestions with more confidence, it would be good to  
know what character is wanted (the original message only showed a  
question mark, as it was sent in Latin-1 encoding, not Unicode).  
Malte, can you enlighten us?

One thought: If your input is Unicode text, you *don't* want to use  
LaTeX packages such as [utf8]{inputenc} that will get in the way of  
XeTeX simply reading the text. This could make it appear that Unicode  
characters are missing, when what is really happening is that they  
aren't being passed through to the font at all, but instead converted  
into representations intended for use with pre-Unicode TeX fonts.

JK