[XeTeX] Problem with tremas

[Lodewijk M. Solzen]

It seems the typical Umlaut-form has vanished from digital type design,
adding to the confusion between trema/diæresis/Umlaut.

Take for example a hot metal/foundry type specimen of Stempel Garamond,
Palatino or almost any other German (Antiqua) fount, including such a modern
design as Futura, in which the uppercase Ä Ö Ü have smaller dots and
differently positioned over the letter than is the case in their digital
successors.

For German texts, it would be more appropriate to use the old style Umlaut
version of the character instead of the trema-flavoured one which is, afaik,
without exception the sole one offered in digital fonts. It would be nice if
these alternates were to be incorporated in the Unicode mapping and thus
likely to become more integrated in digital fonts.

(The same goes for the lining figure zero 0, which had traditionally a
horizontal contrast axis in metal type, as opposed to the vertical axis in
its digital counterpart. But this is just a question of design, not of
legibility.)  

Ludwig