[XeTeX] On combining diacritics again

[John Smith]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, Florian Grammel wrote:

> But might  
> be somebody with a better understanding of TeX than me could suggest  
> how one could solve this with a sort of macro? When meeting a glyph  
> from a certain list (e.g. a combining diacritic), this macro would  
> read the dimensions of the antecedent glyph-box and would "kern" the  
> diacritic, so that it a) is placed centred in relation to the box and  
> b) outside of it.

In pre-XeTeX days this kind of requirement was best handled not by
macros but by creating custom virtual fonts, but these were 8-bit.
There's nothing logically (that I know of) to rule out the use of
16-bit virtual fonts, but as far as I know they aren't a possibility
right now.

My vpl2vpl program
(http://bombay.indology.info/software/programs/index.html, follow link
to accfonts) allows easy creation of accented 8-bit fonts and -- if I
may say so -- does a pretty respectable job. It would be trivial, but
as of now not terribly useful, to modify it to produce 16-bit
output...

John Smith

--
Dr J. D. Smith
jds10 at cam.ac.uk
http://bombay.indology.info