[XeTeX] lacking precomposed character

[David J. Perry]

Yves is right about Charis SIL being very good at combining diacritics 
(because the font creator took some special steps).  If you are using Mac OS 
X, you could also try using any font that contains the combining macron 
(U+0304).  OS X (unlike Windows) tries to position combining diacritics 
properly (even with fonts that aren't specifically designed for this, like 
Charis SIL) and frequently the results are just fine.  That would give you a 
larger choice of fonts; if the positioning of the macron over schwa wasn't 
quite good enough for you in generic fonts, you could fall back on Charis 
SIL.

David

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yves Codet" <ycodet at club-internet.fr>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 3:44 AM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] lacking precomposed character


Hello.

Le 18 mai 09 à 15:58, jadolov k a écrit :

> 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.

Sorry if the following remark is silly. To avoid such difficulties,
you might consider using a better font (better for what you want to
do). As far as I could see, Charis SIL can combine any letter with any
diacritic, and can stack diacritics as is shown in the second (and
meaningless :) example below.

It's available here:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=CharisSILfont

Best wishes,

Yves






--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Hello.


Le 18 mai 09 à 15:58, jadolov k a écrit :


  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.


Sorry if the following remark is silly. To avoid such difficulties, you 
might consider using a better font (better for what you want to do). As far 
as I could see, Charis SIL can combine any letter with any diacritic, and 
can stack diacritics as is shown in the second (and meaningless :) example 
below.


It's available here:


http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=CharisSILfont


Best wishes,


Yves




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


>
>