[XeTeX] t caron problem (gentium font?)

[Jonathan Kew]

On 18 Apr 2009, at 22:11, Václav Šmilauer wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've problem with properly typesetting t caron (ť) with Gentium  
> font. In
> czech typography, the caron should be transformed in a sort of
> apostrophe (for visual reasons), which is correctly done with all  
> fonts
> I've tried except of Gentium.
>
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{fontspec}
> \begin{document}
> 	ť\fontspec{Gentium Book Basic}ť
> \end{document}
>
> gives me such output: http://beta.arcig.cz/~eudoxos/temp/t.pdf  
> (first ť
> is OK, the second is, it seems, simply composed from t and combining
> caron).

Your sample is not using Gentium, it is using Gentium Basic, which has  
a less extensive character set. In particular, looking at the list on http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium_basic 
  confirms that it does not support U+0165, the t-caron. I guess you  
used the sequence <t, combining caron> in your text, in which case (as  
Gentium Basic does not have a special glyph for the combination) it  
will simply place the caron over the t.

If you use the full Gentium font, you'll have U+0165 available with  
the form you expect. (Note that Gentium -- unlike Gentium Basic --  
does not yet have full OpenType support, and so combining diacritics  
may not work well. But for Czech, all the characters you need should  
be available in precomposed form, so provided your text uses the  
precomposed Unicode codepoints, you should be fine.)

JK