[XeTeX] accent circumflex with unicode-math

[Philipp Stephani]

----- Ursprüngliche Mail ----

> Von: Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org>
> An: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms <xetex at tug.org>
> Gesendet: Montag, den 22. November 2010, 14:43:02 Uhr
> Betreff: Re: [XeTeX] accent circumflex with unicode-math
>
> A bit  simpler workaround that imitates TeX behaviour (unless someone is
> going to  write a similar patch for XeTeX too, of course) is to ask Asana
> Math author  to provide a modifier accents as well (Unicode has combining
> accents and  modifier accents, Cambria and XITS provide both with the
> former having wider  variants, Asana provides only combining ones) then
> one can set unicode-math  to use modifier accents for non growing  ones:

Unfortunately that doesn't work in all cases:
1. There are combining accents which have no non-combining counterpart, e.g. the 
arrows
2. The fact that only the combining accents in Cambria Math have entries in the 
AccentTop table indicates that only they are intended for accents
3. It would reintroduce the lack of separation between characters and glyphs 
that struck TeX during the last decades and that was overcome with Unicode and 
OpenType
I noticed that the Microsoft implementation does use stretchable accents in all 
instances, but that doesn't mean that TeX engines have to follow the same route. 
Personally I like the short accents placed above single base characters better. 
(Not to mention that the search for successors in both XeTeX and LuaTeX still 
produces very ugly results.)