[XeTeX] XeTeX and diacritics

[Jonathan Kew]

On 24 Mar 2008, at 1:54 pm, Arash Zeini wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am very new to XeTeX and apologise in case my question is  
> repetitive. I did look at the archives but did not find a solution  
> to my question.
>
> I intend to use XeTeX to typeset a critical edition. This work  
> includes transliteration characters for Pahlavi and Avestan. While  
> using XeTeX has cleared my source file to the extent that I can  
> read it, there are still accented characters that need LaTeX  
> commands. This would generally not be a problem if these characters  
> looked similar in the compiled PDF. Specifically I need a "p" with  
> a bar on top, an underlined capital "P", underlined "H h" and few  
> other characters with double diacritics.
> Gentium does a good job representing most of the characters, but  
> fails when it comes to double diacritics. Right now I use the Basic  
> and Book Basic versions to cover these items.
> But the problem that remains is Gentium's missing bold weights and  
> the underlined characters or the ones with a top bar, since these  
> representations, when generated with LaTeX commands, differ  
> significantly from the ones included in Gentium such as an  
> underlined "Z z" for example. Gentium uses a small line that is  
> centred while LaTeX commands underline the entire width of the  
> character.

The current Gentium release has only limited support for diacritics  
(it has lots of Unicode precomposed forms, but doesn't do accurate  
placement of arbitrary combining marks). You might like to try a font  
such as Charis SIL (see http://scripts.sil.org/CharisSILfont; I think  
it may also be available somewhere in Debian), which has more  
complete support for combining marks.

(Charis also has a bold weight available.)

JK