[XeTeX] No underdot in Adobe Garamond Pro?

Ulrike Fischer news3 at nililand.de
Thu May 7 13:52:19 CEST 2009


Am Thu, 07 May 2009 10:55:20 +0200 schrieb Benct Philip Jonsson:


>> \d{A}, \d{n}

> Isn't the whole point with Xe(La)TeX not to
> have to use things like \d{}?
 
> Says I who use a Vim keymap to have ".d"
> automagically replaced by "ḍ".  I guess
> nobody (and nosoftware) is perfect, but
> the resulting file is more readable:
> 
> \textit{daṇḍin}
> 
> vs.
> 
> \textit{da\d{n}\d{d}in}

XeTeX gives you the opportunity to enter glyphs directly, but it
doesn't force you to do it. Which input method is the best depends a
lot on personal preferences, your local keyboard and also on the
glyph.

I would certainly never use \"u instead of ü. But I at least do find
it much easier to use commands for symbols I use rather seldom than
to set up a lot of shortcuts in my editor which I will probably not
remember when I need them. And even with pdflatex I don't use all
chars I could input directly. E.g. I always use -- and --- and not
the corresponding unicode glyphs because at my opinion it is much
more readable.  

Also using the direct glyph will not solve the problem discussed
here. If a glyph is not in a font it doesn't reappear if you use
another input method.

And at last: commands can be defined to work in various
circumstances. \d{<ARG>} will work with new open type fonts *and*
with old OT1/T1 encoded fonts and with a lot of <ARG>'s -- and you
can easily redefine it. It is quite possible that a future xunicode
defines \d in such a way that it tests if the glyph is in the font
and use a fallback if not. 

-- 
Ulrike Fischer 



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