[XeTeX] adding some diacritics to a font

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 07.01.2009 um 01:33 schrieb Ross Moore:

Hello Ross!

Your explanation was really helpful! My opinion on xunicode.sty has  
changed therefore.

> Now \d{n}  will produce:  U+006E;U+0323;
> which is 'n' followed by the combining dot-below accent.
>
> However, if your font doesn't have ṇ then it probably
> doesn't have the combining dot-below accent either.
> It which case this hasn't really helped at all.

I was experimenting with Futura in Mac OS X. Indeed it does not have  
COMBINING DOT BELOW, but has for example COMBINING DOT ABOVE.

>
> To revert to LaTeX's old way of doing accents, by placing
> two glyphs instead of one, you can simply change the encoding;
> e.g.
>
> {\fontencoding{OT1}\selectfont
>    \d{n}}
>
> In practice, you would build this into a macro; e.g. for
> choosing the font that you need for these accented characters.
> Or you could build a macro such as:
>
> \newcommand{\dotbelow}[1]{{fontencoding{OT1} ... \selectfont\d{#1}}}
>
> where the ... means whatever else you need to get the correct font.

I don't see so much sense in using old 7- or 8-bit encodings in  
XeTeX! (And, actually, it would require writing macros!) So I simply  
tried <some character><COMBINING DOT ABOVE> or other combinations, as  
already Benct Philip Jonsson suggested in an earlier post and I am  
also used from typing in UNIX. IMO placement could be optimised quite  
often ...

And I then thought of using missing accents from other "fontspec"  
fonts. It would make things simpler: <some character>{\accent  
<COMBINING DOT ABOVE>} or, when converted to a command macro: <some  
character>\accent{<COMBINING DOT ABOVE>}. In Mac OS X, Lucida Grande  
could be a great source of all accents ...


--
Greetings

   Pete

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.