[XeTeX] XeTex and Accents

[Radhakrishna Valiveti]

Hi,

   I have recently started using xelatex (with MikTex 2.7) instead of pdflatex. I have a question about getting accents with xetex. Here are couple of constraints/requirements for what I am looking for:
For the book that I am
working we need to use three TTF fonts (for different portions of the
text): MS Trebuchet, Futura, and Arial. I don't have much freedom in
choosing different fonts (since we have to preserve the formatting used
in earlier editions of the book).
The text in each of these
fonts may have the accents: \=, \d, and \. applied to some of the
letters. Sometimes, the text with these accents is underlined as well.
In order to make sure that underline doesn't hide the dot below the
letter, I need to control the placement of the dot accurately. 
I
would like a general solution that would produce controllable
accents/diacritics, regardless of the fonts. If there has to be some
dependence on the fonts, I would like such dependencies to be localized
to very few macros. It appears to me that using the "preformed"
character from the font (if it exists) may not give me all the
flexibility I need. What do you think?
 I am currently using the style files: fontspec, exaccent and the following macros to control the placement of diacritics that I need:
%======================================
% Adjustment to the location of accents
%=======================================
\DeclareTextCommand{\=}{EU1}[1]{\upperaccent[-0.2ex]{"00AF}{#1}}
 %macron
\DeclareTextCommand{\.}{EU1}[1]{\upperaccent[-0.2ex]{"00B7}{#1}} %dot
\DeclareTextCommand{\d}{EU1}[1]{\loweraccent[0.1ex]{"00B7}{#1}}  %dot

But
I find that the macron over the letter is just too large and doesn't
look nice (the hyphen looks too small as an overbar). Do we have any
other choice for this? 
I would like the same macro(s) to work
with (a) older, non-unicode TTF fonts that have been somehow adapted by
fontspec to be usable by xetex, or (b) newer unicode fonts on my machine.
When I tried the unicode font called "Gentium"
(which I found on the scripts.sil.org website), the diacritics over the letters in this font don't look appealing at all (i.e. the above TextCommands don't seem to have any affect --- it is perhaps picking a preformed glyph from the font). Is there anything I can do?
 I look forward to hearing from people who have faced similar issues, and may have a solution to this issue.

thanks,
radha 
Radhakrishna Valiveti 
rvaliveti at yahoo.com 


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