[XeTeX] fonts and diacritics

[hanneder at staff.uni-marburg.de]

I am planning my first publication formatted with XeLaTeX (rather than  
pdflatex) and have tried out
a few fonts.

The problem is that I need diacritics for Indian languages. In  
pdflatex I use ucs for the
utf-input, which is not perfect, but works with a few tweaks.  Of  
course there can be no serious
problem in normal TeX, where you can in the worst case just type  
things like \.n \d{t} and the
like, which gives you the diacritics with any font (and mostly looks  
quite good).

In XeTeX a considerable number of otf-fonts does not yield the  
expected result. In the ADF fonts,
for instance, regardless whether you use ṅ or \.n, it does not work.  
Usually the macron \=a works,
but not the underdot ṭ (\d{t}) or the dot above the ṅ (\.n).

1. Did I miss anything (a trick in XeTeX)? Since other fonts (for  
instance all TeXGyre fonts) work
just fine, I thought not.

2. Or is it the case that some (actually many) fonts supposed to work  
with XeTeX are weak in
diacritics?

3. If so, is it possible to make any predictions whether a commercial  
font will or will not suffer
the same fate. I would of course not want to buy one of the "Top Ten  
Typefaces" (1. Minion, 2. ITC
Baskerville) only to find out that they are unusable for the purpose.

Any comments and experiences, tests if you have some of those fonts,  
would be most welcome!

Jürgen

---

Prof. Dr. Juergen Hanneder
Philipps-Universitaet Marburg
FG Indologie u. Tibetologie
Deutschhausstr.12
35032 Marburg
Germany
Tel. 0049-6421-28-24930
hanneder at staff.uni-marburg.de