(J<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">Dear Jonathan Kew,<BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
(JThanks for your very helpful remarks. <BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
(JThe<BR>(B
(J<BLOCKQUOTE CITE STYLE="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px" TYPE="CITE"></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">"normal" way to get an 'a' with macron would be to directly use the<BR>(B
(JUnicode character U+0101, '</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Osaka" LANG="11" SIZE="2">$B".(J</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">', in the document. (Or the sequence <0061,<BR>(B
(J0304>.) This should work with any Unicode-compliant font that supports<BR>(B
(Jthis character.</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2"><BR>(B
(J</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2"><BR>(B
(JYes that much is clear to me, and it works fine for Unicode fonts with many glyphs (such as your Gentium). However it would be nice if I were able to use Adobe OT fonts which do not have all of the composite diacritic characters used for transliterating Indian languages ready made. In my old Textures setup this was easy, once I had generated the metrics of various Adobe type 1 fonts with edmetrics it was possible to do some simple catcode redefinitions such as: <BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
\(Jcatcode`(B\$B"w(J=(B\(Jactive(B\(Jdef$B"w(J{(B\(Jd{t}} %typed option t becomes t with underdot<BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
(Jand then use a screen font that used these conventions. These would then be aplied to any type 1 font. The same was possible with LaTeX inputenc. Thanks to your examples it seems to me now that it should be possible to do this again *provided* that XeTeX permits this catcode redefinition.<BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
(J<BLOCKQUOTE CITE STYLE="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px" TYPE="CITE"></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">It seems that the AAT tables in the font don't actually access this<BR>(B
(Jglyph. There's a font feature "Conjuncts=Additional Conjuncts" that you<BR>(B
(Jcan turn on in Devanagari MT, but when I try this I *still* don't get<BR>(B
(Jthat ligature. This would be a question for the font people at Apple, I<BR>(B
(Jguess.</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2"><BR>(B
(J</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2"><BR>(B
(JTo my surprise I now see that an OT font called "Sanskrit 2003" does produce this ligature if you add :script=deva. It is a fairly ugly typeface however (is it utf-16?). <BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
(J<BLOCKQUOTE CITE STYLE="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px" TYPE="CITE"></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">(In XeTeX, if you *really* want to see the glyph, you could produce it<BR>(B
(Jwith "(B\(JXeTeXglyph 279", or 281 if you prefer the alternate glyph shape,<BR>(B
(Jbut that's absolutely not how you want to be encoding documents, and<BR>(B
(Jit's dependent on the exact version of the font that you have; the<BR>(B
(Jglyph ID may not stay constant across different versions.)<BR>(B
(J</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2"><BR>(B
(J</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2"><BR>(B
(JYes, this might be a temporary solution.<BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
(J<BR>(B
(J<BLOCKQUOTE CITE STYLE="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px" TYPE="CITE"></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">Somadeva</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2"></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></HTML>(B