[XeTeX] fonts and diacritics

[Rembrandt Wolpert]

On 6/13/15 9:23 AM, hanneder at staff.uni-marburg.de wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex

Brill (the publisher from Leiden) offers a (free, as in no cost) font with:

"complete coverage of the Latin script with the full range of diacritics
and linguistics (IPA) characters used to display any language from any
period correctly, and Greek and Cyrillic are also covered. [...] The
“Brill” fonts comply with all international standards, including Unicode."

See http://www.brill.com/about/brill-fonts

Hope this is useful.

Rembrandt

-- 
人生䘮亂世 無君欲誰仕
 - 劉因 (1249-1293)