[XeTeX] Polytonic greek and XeLaTeX
Jonathan Kew
jonathan_kew at sil.org
Mon Dec 31 11:48:51 CET 2007
On 31 Dec 2007, at 12:13 am, Johannes Engel wrote:
> Jonathan Kew schrieb:
>> Maybe it's not relevant here, but I don't know what you mean by a
>> "composed" glyph compared to a "prepared" one.
> OK, see the difference:
> This one is a composed one: Ὀ (i.e. a capital Omicron and a psili),
> this one is a prepared one: Ὀ (i.e. one letter Omicron with psili).
OK, I figured you must mean something like that, but wasn't clear
about the terms; I'd usually refer to these as "decomposed" versus
"precomposed" representations. They look identical when I read your
email, though. (That would depend on the capabilities of the email
client and the fonts it's using. In principle, these two
representations *should* be indistinguishable, but many systems and
fonts don't quite achieve that.)
Interestingly, when I used copy-and-paste to get the text from your
email into an editor, both of these lines (and your earlier sample)
ended up with the precomposed character -- so something (either my
mail client or editor) seems to be applying Unicode normalization
rules (NFC). That's why the original test worked for me with Minion Pro.
So the explanation is that your text contained decomposed sequences,
but Minion Pro doesn't support these. Indeed, looking into the font,
I see that it lacks the combining marks from the Unicode 03xx block.
So it will only work with accented Greek (or Latin, for that matter)
if the data uses precomposed characters.
JK
More information about the XeTeX
mailing list