[XeTeX] accent circumflex with unicode-math

[Khaled Hosny]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 03:20:07PM +0000, Philipp Stephani wrote:
> ----- 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.)

That is all nice and I 100% agree with, but until such support is added
to XeTeX and LuaTeX, this is the best we can do (that what ConTeXt MkIV
is doing, for example).

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer