I feel that I should have solved the following question myself---I
have a long history of making
diacritics for Sanskrit work in different incarnations of TeX since
1991---but I have never
understood the technicalities of otf fonts.
Currently I am trying to use high quality Adobe Fonts for Sanskrit
texts, which need the following
diacritics: āīūṛś ḍḷṭṣṃḥṛṝṣṅṇ (ideally also with capitals). The font
Adobe Text Pro prints them
perfectly, but Minion Pro does not.
However, if you enter your own text on the fontshop website, it seems
to work, and this is why I
prematurely bought yet another new version of Minion Pro, hoping that
it would work this time.
If you look at font with fontforge, many utf code positions for Indic
Transliteration are empty,
i.e. Minionpro does not have the characters with diacritics, Adobe
Text Pro has them. So far, so
good (or not).
The hotline of fontshop.com thinks that there is an OpenType feature
that creates so-called
Composits out of the elements. I can understand the mechanism, I guess
I have tweaked something
similar in pdflatex or OmegaTeX in the pre-otf era, but I have no idea
whether one of these
mechanism can be utilised in Xe-, Lua- Or ConTeXt nowadays. I was
hoping that some fontfeatures
(fakecombining=yes,compose=yes) would do the trick, but apparently
they do not.
In a sense this is no big deal. There are many nice fonts around (and
those that come with ConTeXt
are great), but I was used to printing books with an old Type-1 Minion
(www.ctan.org/pkg/w-a-schmidt) and find it hard to accept that this
should not be possible with the
modern flavours of TeX.
My system:
This is LuaTeX, Version 1.16.0 (TeX Live 2023/Arch Linux)
open source > level 1, order 1, name
'/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/context/base/mkiv/cont-yes.mkiv'
Minimal example:
\enableregime[utf]
\setuppapersize[A4]
\definefontfeature[default][default][fakecombining=yes,compose=yes]
\starttypescript [serif] [adobetextpro]
\definefontsynonym[AdobeTextPro-Regular]
[file:AdobeTextPro-Regular] [features=default]
\definefontsynonym[AdobeTextPro-Italic]
[file:AdobeTextPro-Italic] [features=default]
\definefontsynonym[AdobeTextPro-Bold]
[file:AdobeTextPro-Bold] [features=default]
\stoptypescript
\starttypescript [serif] [adobetextpro] [name]
\definefontsynonym [Serif] [AdobeTextPro-Regular]
\definefontsynonym [SerifItalic] [AdobeTextPro-Italic]
\definefontsynonym [SerifBold] [AdobeTextPro-Bold]
\stoptypescript
\starttypescript [adobetextpro]
\definetypeface [adobetextpro] [rm] [serif] [adobetextpro]
[default] [features=default]
\stoptypescript
\starttypescript [serif] [minionpro]
\definefontsynonym[MinionPro-Regular] [file:MinionPro-Regular]
[features=default]
\stoptypescript
\starttypescript [serif] [minionpro] [name]
\definefontsynonym [Serif] [MinionPro-Regular]
\stoptypescript
\starttypescript [minionpro]
\definetypeface [minionpro] [rm] [serif] [minionpro] [default]
[features=default]
\stoptypescript
\setupbodyfont[minionpro]
\starttext
Test of Diacritics for ``Indic transliteration''
MinionPro: āīūṛś ḍṭṣṃḥṛṣ % here no underdot diacritics
\setupbodyfont[adobetextpro]
Adobe Text Pro āīūṛś ḍṭṣṃḥṛṣ % here all diacritics show
\stoptext
---
Prof. Dr. Juergen Hanneder
Philipps-Universitaet Marburg
FG Indologie u. Tibetologie
Deutschhausstr.12
35032 Marburg
Germany
Tel. 0049-6421-28-24930
hanne...@staff.uni-marburg.de
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