[XeTeX] Long i with overbar and no dot

[Philiрp Rеichmuth]

Am Wed, 12 May 2010 10:55:47 +0300 schrieb Khaled Hosny:
> Or, alternatively, just use the proper unicode character in your input
> (though, I myself, find TeX notation a bit handy).

It would be even handier if it was easier to configure xunicode's glyph
replacement for precomposed characters.

Currently I have a lot of \DeclareTextAccent in my preamble to customize
accents for fonts that don't have the necessary precomposed characters
together with \catcode declarations along the lines of
\catcode `ṗ = \active\let ṗ\pdotabove
\catcode `ʿ = \active\let ʿ\PRAin

That way I can supplement a lot of Unicode precomposed glyphs for fonts
that don't have them. It is workable and looks reasonably well in most
cases, but the preamble is a bit unwieldy and the text accents are a bit
hackish.

It would be nice to have more customization options for xunicode's
behaviour (no replacement, replacement with "proper" Unicode accent glyphs,
replacement with similarly-looking glyphs such as macron -> dash, that sort
of thing). One of the reasons why I got into TeX in the first place was
that it was easy to use lots of different accents with standard fonts in
printed output. XeTeX is very useful for Unicode, but it forces me again to
have glyphs for all the fonts or to get hackish.  While I am aware of the
limitations such as searching in PDFs, it would still be useful to
customize the replacements xunicode is doing at a higher level than
changing character encodings all the time.

Philipp