Please do not use the traditional TeX codes for the Indic diacritics (things
like \={a} etc.)! One of the big advantages of XeTeX is precisely that it uses
Unicode. This means that your input file can be typed using any
Unicode-supporting text editor (I use TeXShop on a Mac, TeXworks on Linux). It
is obviously much more efficient to write and read "prajñāvādāṃśca bhāṣase"
than "praj\~{n}\={a}v\={a}d\={a}\d{m}\'{s}ca bh\={a}\d{s}ase". There are
numerous good Unicode fonts, also such that are freely available, that produce
fine results, both onscreen and on paper.
Because I had a number of files containing all those TeX codes and wanted to
switch to XeTeX, I wrote a simple program (or 'script', as some people say) in
Python (the older version 2.7, which is still the standard version on many
machines; but it can be rather quickly adapted for version 3, I imagine) that
takes a (La)TeX or ConTeXt input file with the TeX codes for Indic diacritical
marks and creates an output file with all those codes turned into Unicode. (The
one condition is that each letter with a diacritical mark is placed between
braces. "\={a}" etc. will be recognized, but "\=a" will not, and therefore will
remain unconverted.)
Should anyone be interested in receiving a copy of the program, please write to
me off-list.
Robert Zydenbos
--
Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie
Universität München
On Jun 13, 2015, at 10:23 , hanne...@staff.uni-marburg.de wrote:
> [...]
>
> 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). [...]
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