[XeTeX] lacking precomposed character

[John Was]

Hello Artemij

As an interim measure (until an elegant solution is suggested), you can set the non-zero-width macron (positiong 00AF) on top of the schwa thus:

\def\overstrike#1#2{\setbox0=\hbox{#1}\setbox1=\hbox{#2}\copy0

   \kern -0.5\wd0 \kern -0.5\wd1 \copy1 \kern -0.5\wd1 \kern 0.5\wd0}



\overstrike{ə}{¯}



Of course that is tedious to type, so, after defining \overstrike as above, you can use something like





\def\ə{\overstrike{ə}{¯}}



Then for the schwa with macron just type {\ə} or simply \ə if you don't mind adding a space after it in the middle of a word, and an explicit space (\ ) after it if it comes at the end of a word (personally I prefer {\ə}so one doesn't have to think about the following space).



This isn't very nice but it might help if you are in a hurry to get through some piece of work, and you can search and replace on it afterwards when something better is suggested.



Best





John















  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: jadolov k 
  To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
  Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 2:58 PM
  Subject: [XeTeX] lacking precomposed character


  Hi to all,
  What I need to obtain is a certain character with the macro sign above it (namely, a schwa with a macron, that serves to the transliteration needs for Ancient Indonesian). However, the Unicode standard lacks a precomposed entry for that character. Still, with the package Xunicode I can use the command \= to add a combining unicode compliant macron sign to any character (can't I?). The problem is that the font I use (Minion Pro) does not have a good combining macron glyph. Therefore, when I write \={<something_strange>} I obtain only this <something_strange> followed by a null character instead of being "covered" with a macron. 
  So, my question is: is there some way to substitute the glyph used by Xunicode as the macron sign? something similar to the command \textsuperscript* or \fakesuperscript provided by the package xltxtra.
  Any idea?
  Thank all the people in advance.
  Artemij Keidan
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