[XeTeX] Polytonic greek and XeLaTeX

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "JK" == Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> writes:

>> 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).

JK> Interestingly, when I used copy-and-paste to get the text from your  
JK> email into an editor, both of these lines (and your earlier sample)  
JK> ended up with the precomposed character -- so something (either my  
JK> mail client or editor) seems to be applying Unicode normalization  
JK> rules (NFC). That's why the original test worked for me with Minion Pro.

I can confirm that the two did make it though the list as Johannes intended.

JK> So the explanation is that your text contained decomposed sequences,  
JK> but Minion Pro doesn't support these. Indeed, looking into the font,  
JK> I see that it lacks the combining marks from the Unicode 03xx block.  
JK> So it will only work with accented Greek (or Latin, for that matter)  
JK> if the data uses precomposed characters.

Tom Phinney posted about this in his blog¹ last month.  In short, neither
their apps nor their FDK supported the combining marks until recently.

Future versions of the fonts are likely to support them.  Until then any
apps will need to convert the input to NFC (or NKFC if desired) when
using Adobe fonts.  (It is possible that Garamond Premier Pro may be an
exception, at least in its most recent version and specifically in
reference to Polytonic Greek.  But that supposition is based on a foggy
memory of the posts about the font on Adobe's typography forum.  So
please do not quote me. :)

1] http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2007/12/combining_accents.html

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6