[XeTeX] stacking diacritics without mark-to-mark

Khaled Hosny khaledhosny at eglug.org
Thu Mar 13 10:41:44 CET 2014


On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 07:46:58PM -0400, maxwell wrote:
> On 2014-03-12 14:47, Joshua and Amy wrote:
> >I'm typesetting with XeLaTeX, using fontspec, and calling a font
> >provided to me by the publisher of a manuscript I'm working on. (Same
> >as my previous post!)
> >
> >The language I work with has a letter O with circumflex and breve
> >(U+00F4,U+0306): ô̆. However, the publisher-provided font does not
> >use mark-to-mark positioning, so when I typeset in XeLaTeX, the
> >combining breve overlays the circumflex.
> >
> >Back in January of 2013, there was discussion of this very issue,
> >which included talk of a potentially forthcoming solution where XeTeX
> >would handle this problem for us. Does anyone know whether there is
> >now a straightforward way of doing this?
> 
> I'm the one who started the thread a year ago, and I'm very definitely
> interested in this problem.  The post saying that this problem would soon be
> fixed is this one:
>    http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/2013-January/024031.html
> namely
>    ...next XeTeX (thanks the new HarfBuzz layout engine),
>    will try to position the accents using their bounding boxes
>    if the font does not have a GPOS table, so it should produce
>    better results in this case (unless the font in question
>    does have a GPOS table).
> 
>    Regards,
>    Khaled
> Afaict, this does not work under the TeXLive 2013 version, at least not with
> this publisher's font.  Am I missing s.t.?

It is a heuristic and thus can fail for many reason, and I personally
did not test it with stacked marks.

Regards,
Khaled




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