[XeTeX] XeTeX and diacritics

[Daniel Stender]

Arash Zeini wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am very new to XeTeX and apologise in case my question is repetitive. I did look at the archives but did not find a solution to my question.
> 
> I intend to use XeTeX to typeset a critical edition. This work includes transliteration characters for Pahlavi and Avestan. While using XeTeX has cleared my source file to the extent that I can read it, there are still accented characters that need LaTeX commands. This would generally not be a problem if these characters looked similar in the compiled PDF. Specifically I need a "p" with a bar on top, an underlined capital "P", underlined "H h" and few other characters with double diacritics.
> Gentium does a good job representing most of the characters, but fails when it comes to double diacritics. Right now I use the Basic and Book Basic versions to cover these items.
> But the problem that remains is Gentium's missing bold weights and the underlined characters or the ones with a top bar, since these representations, when generated with LaTeX commands, differ significantly from the ones included in Gentium such as an underlined "Z z" for example. Gentium uses a small line that is centred while LaTeX commands underline the entire width of the character.
> 
> Is there a way out of this situation? I use Debian's newest XeTeX with KDE.
> 
> Thanks and regards,
> Arash

I've got the same problem with transliterating Rgvedic material (Oldindoaryan). Because there are certain diacritics plus accents one reason to switch
to XeTeX for me instead of using ucs.sty (Unicode packet) was that it's capable to do the combining diacritical marks:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf
But certainly you need a font which can do it. I've found that Junicode coming from the medievalists is very useful for such a task:
http://junicode.sourceforge.net/
To type them is another question independent of XeTeX. If you need diacritical combinations are not available through the
latin sets plus the combined diacritical marks there is going to be a problem.

Daniel Stender