[XeTeX] something wrong with xunicode.sty [WAS: do you see...]

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:35:05 +1000 schrieb Ross Moore:


>>> According to the answer by Syros Apostolos to my previous mail,
>>> character "\b n" (n , b , d whatever) is undefined if you load
>>> xunicode.sty, and is defined if you don't load it....
>>>
>>> I don't understand why because this can be read in xunicode.sty:
>>>
>>> \DeclareUTFcomposite[\UTFencname]{x1E47}{\d}{n}
>>>
>>> Who can help?
>>
>> The \b is defined in xunicode as
>>
>> \DeclareEncodedCompositeCharacter{\UTFencname}{\b}{0332}{005F}
> 
> No; this isn't a *definition* of \b .
> It is a *declaration* of what to do, under certain circumstances.

OK, wrong choice of word ;-)

> 
> In the case at hand, it is actually irrelevant, since the
> appropriate circumstances do not arise.
> 
> These later declarations take precedence:
> 
>   \DeclareUTFcomposite[\UTFencname]{x1E48}{\b}{N}
>   \DeclareUTFcomposite[\UTFencname]{x1E49}{\b}{n}
> 
> so that with the combination of accent \b  and letter  n
> XeTeX is asked to use  \char"1E49 .

Ah. I had overlooked the code for the case n and N. This also explains
why \b{n} outputs only the .notdef-char while with \b{i} you get the
char i + .notdef, I was already wondering.



>> There 0332 refers to an "combining low line"-char and 005F is the low
>> line.
> 
> If you want to test availability of the "combining low line" accent
> character, with the letter 'n' you can do it using:
> 
>    \b{{{n}}}

I used \showthe\XeTeXcharglyph "0332.

>> This works fine e.g. with the lmodern fonts, but fails with your
>> Linotype because it seems not to have the 0332-char. You should always
>> expect that some chars doesn't exist in some fonts and so some
>> definitions can fails.
>>
>> If you don't load xunicode \b will fall back to its default
>> OT1-definition (I didn't try if it works).
> 
> This will work, but visually only.
> If you try to copy/paste from the resulting PDF then you
> will not get anything sensible for the accent character.

Yes that's often the problem with this faked chars. But the real chars
(if I use e.g. the latin modern fonts) seems not the copy/paste good too
(when using adobe reader 7).


-- 
Ulrike Fischer